Google? Froogle? Scroogle?

If you haven't already, read Scroogled, by Cory Doctorow. It's a short story about what would happen if Google got hold of all his data. it makes you think. It's a free PDF to download, but make sure you don't get the Spanish version.

Of Habits and Googles

Just thinking about Google and their phone making, i looked closely and saw this:


Google tried htc but Sense prevailed. They tried Samsung but when the touch was so Wiz they gave up and bought Motorola. Now they will be the Android people and that weird moto interface will be no more. or Google will try LG. Google will own the Hardware and software.

But for companies they have the habit problem:

Take off the h and a bit remains. take off the a and bit remains. Take off the b and it remains." The quote from some old English teacher.

Dependant on Dependancies? "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em"

I think I have just found the best Package Management system ever. Probably. Definitely. And, as far as I'm concerned, even though I would rather get rid of the Packagement problems and have some sort of Mac-style App system, but with a Libs folder for all external libraries to go to, this is as good as package managers get. It's even got an awesome name.

...The world's best package manager ever, is.....

Pacman!!! from Arch Linux. I've been installing Arch (and am using it at the moment to write this post) and it's so simple to use

Like normal commands, options can be strung together, rather than Apt-get's way of making you either update, upgrade OR install, but not update and then install a new package.

To update the mirror list and upgrade to the latest packages, you simply run (as root) pacman -Syu

To install package foo, simply type pacman -S foo

It can also install package groups, so for example instead of having to install each dependency of gnome like sudo apt-get install gnome-system-monitor empathy empathy empathy-dbg... you just type pacman -S gnome and it asks you for the packages you want install (it displays a list)

Gary the Snail

Windows users are like snails. And so is Windows to be fair. It takes ages to do anything, and puts in features what happened ages ago, but the most snail-like thing I have found is this:

Back in the early 2000s and before that, we had the browser wars with Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer (4,5,6) and a few others. But, then it all ended and we now have FF and Chrome, and other stuff. But Windows users, with the release of Windows 7 have discovered the browser wars, and are fighting Chrome against IE.

That was so last decade, lads! keep up!

So, in 20 years time, when windows is Dead, it will be Linux vs MAC OSX, at the rate everything is moving in the proprietary world.

Hair, sorry, hare and tortoise, except the hare wins