Posts Tagged “Open Source”
After reading some quotes from Linus about the recent code submission from Microsoft it got me thinking about my feeling towards Microsoft. In the past when I was in University I really did have some strong negative feeling towards Microsoft. I had to use their software, and it did not always do what I wanted how I wanted it done.
However now that I am older and… well just older I find myself caring much less about who makes the software, and more about whether it works or not. In the end that is what’s important.
For example, I wanted to build a home server and I automatically went for Ubuntu server. I fought to get the printer working, then fought to get CUPS working, then Samba etc. I know that Linux could do everything I wanted, but every feature I wanted require setup and time on my part. In the end I only had a Print server and a very simple Samba share.
In the end I bought Windows Home Server for $99.00 with the hardware I used for the server. So far it is doing everything I want, plus with add-ins seems to offer many options for expansion. I will go into Windows Home Server a little more in a later post.
I think the point I am trying to make is that I am trying not to judge products on who makes it. Just because Microsoft makes something does not make it bad, and just because something is Apple or Linux does not make it the best solution. With information reviews, and other peoples experiences so readily available we can make informed choices about products and rely less on brands.
Recently I pretty much switched to Google Chrome as my browser of choice on my Windows machine. The feature I liked the most was the speed by far. I use GMail alot now and JavaScript performance is important. Firefox 3 was lagging behind quite a bit by being perceivably slower than Chrome at loading and working with Javascript heavy sites. Thankfully Firefox 3.5 (in particular TraceMonkey) takes a big step in closing the gap.
Firefox 3.5 still does not seem quite as fast too me as Chrome, but it is much much faster than 3.1 was. It’s so much faster that I can now live with it again. I am even willing to give up some of the features I loved about Chrome like the unified URL bar, and the threaded tabs to get access to some of the extensions in Firefox.
As I recently posted I bought a Macbook Pro, and have been using Firefox as the main browser in OS X. So now using extentions like XMarks or the in development Weave Project to keep all my bookmarks and links together.
Firefox 3.5 so far seems like a good upgrade and has once again taken the thrown of default browser on both my systems. Hopefully this fierce competition will continue, and leave IE even further in their dust.
I just started re-ripping all my CD’s again, and this time I am trying to do it a little more smartly. This time I am ripping everything to lossless FLAC format. This was I will not have to rip my CD’s again. I will have a high quality archive of all my music, which I can just encode into any lossey format I want or need later.
I like iTunes and now I have a MacBook Pro I was even more complled to use it, but I really dislike how they refuse to support any other music formats. I started to encode in Apple Lossless but then thought better of it. Because it seems like you are at the mercy of Apple if you ever want to re-encode you music in a format other than AAC.
For the ripping I am using Exact Audio Copy to ripping with all error checking on. Then using the external FLAC encoder.
Ofcourse now I am sitting there looking at my high quality FLAC music and I do not want to re-encode it and make a lower quality AAC file for iTunes, and I do not want to make another huge Apple Lossless archive just for iTunes. So I started checking out other music players again.
After checking out a few I finally gave Songbird a try again, and boy has it improved quickly. The last time I tried it was just when it had come out of BETA of it’s 1.0 release. Songbird is now at 1.2 and it is much better. But that’s another post.
So now on my main computer I am playing FLAC files in Songbird, on my laptop I am going to be using AAC in iTunes and use that to sync my iPod. Seems to be my best shot at having the best of both worlds, portability and quality.
I have a few plans for updating my speakers and sound so I will post about that later.
*UPDATE 9/10/2006: After reading some more “editorials from an analytical perspective” on the Popular Tecnology I now see that they are a Microsoft advocate blog pretending to be a impartial source. I think that sites like OSNews should be a little more careful when picking thier sources.
While browsing OS News I found a link to an article claiming that IE is more secure in 2006 than Firefox. They base this statement on the fact that Firefox had more vulnerabilities found this year. This is an extremely naive way to measure the security of a certain browser to another. There are several reasons why the metric they used to measure security is useless which I will briefly go over now.
