Joseph Brower

I was told that I should get a twitter account.  I’ve never used twitter, but since it is insanely popular, I figured I’d better use it.  I’ve got wordpress integrated into it now, so when I post here, it should update my twitter account.  Let’s see how this works.  You can see it at http://twitter.com/josephnexus .

I was thinking the other day, why is market share so important?  I read various articles saying Linux has X market share, Mac has Y market share, and Windows has Z market share.  I would like to throw the following question out to the masses.  Who cares?  The pie is large enough in this industry that it doesn’t really matter.  Especially when you look at this on a global scale.  If I was producing something in an industry this size, I would be thrilled to have 0.01 percent market share.  I understand that market share is extremely useful in determining growth of any product, but in this case I seriously don’t think it matters all that much beyond a growth measurement.  Right now it is very difficult to quantify which operating systems are being used the most.  We can’t count sales (there are many free operating systems.)  We can’t count downloads (one person could download it multiple times.)  We can’t even count website visits (my blog is visited more under Ubuntu Linux than any other operating system.)

So could someone tell me why it is so important to try to expend all of this energy on market share calculations?  Isn’t market share simply supposed to tell us if there is an increase or a decline in a particular product’s use?  Relative accuracy is important while complete accuracy is not.  If you measure using the same tool each time and see a growth, then you can be confident that a growth has occurred.  Expending all of this energy on trying to calculate the exact number of Linux users isn’t going to really benefit everyone.  Let’s try to focus on actually making good products and having them speak for themselves.

Now before everyone starts to call me a zealot and a person that’s just upset that linux has a small market share, let me say one more thing.  Everything has started with a small market share, and it hasn’t mattered before.  Any new product starts small.  Any new service starts small.  That’s the point!  They don’t start out saying “We have 0% market penetration so we have failed.”  What they do instead is look at what overhead they can afford and build their business around that.  I ran an open source business for a while, and had a very small market share, but I lived quite comfortably.  Market share isn’t the be-all, end-all, it is just one of many tools that companies can use to determine if they are growing or shrinking.  It isn’t some magical tool that tells them if they are successful.

I’ve always had a hard time finding a reliable backup solution that was easy to set up and to work with after the initial set up.  As I mentioned in an earlier posting, I think I found an excellent solution for those of us with a desktop computer and an external hard drive.  The application that I’m using is called Back In Time.  You can find it at http://backintime.le-web.org/ .  It was extemely easy to set up and thus far as exceeded all of my expectations.  I’ve got it backing up to my new hard disk every hour and have found it very easy to go through and ensure that all of my important data is there.  The interface is easy and in about 15 minutes I had everything important to me being backed up.  It is really something everyone that is running linux as their desktop should at least look into.

As most of you know probably know, I don’t run Windows.  It isn’t because I don’t own a copy or anything, I simply haven’t had a need.  Recently I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 and decided to install Virtualbox.  This is an excellent virtualization tool and I figured I’d take my old copy of Windows XP Home and install it inside of the virtual machine.

As far as I know, that is perfectly acceptable since it is only going to be installed inside of this single VM and it isn’t installed anywhere else.  I installed it, that all went smooth.  I installed the guest additions (from virtualbox) that allow it to properly work with the mouse and such and was happy when everything was working properly.  Then I got the reminder to activate my copy.  This is something that I don’t have to deal with in Ubuntu, but I’ve fixed enough windows machines to know that activation is needed or your copy shuts off after about 30 days.  I’ve probably spent a total of many hours on the phone with Microsoft explaining to them that I am within my EULA rights to activate my copy (or the copy for the machine that I’m working on… as I occasionally repair friends computers and they may have required a reinstall of their operating system.)  This is unacceptable.  Not only am I being made to call a number so that I can use what I own, I’m also wasting my time doing so.  The internet activation didn’t work for me because I had installed this particular copy too many times (on the same machine) and they figured I must be doing something shady.  So my question is, where do I send the invoice?  If pirates don’t have to waste their time activating, why should I?  Wouldn’t I be in a better situation if I “pirated” the copy and sent a check to Microsoft?  That would enable me to use Windows without having to call in.  Anyways, I’ll be sending a letter to Microsoft asking where I can send the invoice for all of my time spent activating Windows for myself and on behalf of others.

So everything finally backed up.  After verifying that we had everything backed up, we booted up off of the 9.04 64bit disk and started the installation.  After the install, this booted up blazingly quick.  I can’t complain at all about ext4, but since I’ve heard stories of data being lost, we’re going to be using our new external drive to backup the software.  The install was very similar to previous editions of Ubuntu, but it did look nicer.  We told it that we wanted the proprietary nvidia drivers and it gladly downloaded and installed them for us.  We also copied our information back.  I dont’ know if all of this has to do with ext4 or not, but copying our files back took far less time than copying our files to the drive.  About half the time to be precise.  This was something that made me very happy, since we do a lot of RAW photography, it can be very cumbersome working on large files.  We’ve settled on using Back-In-TIme for backups.  It is based on TImeVault and seems to be easier to use and has a 64Bit version.  That will make our backups easily managed and easily recovered from if need be.  Anyways, all went well, as I expected since we don’t have an intel card.  I’ll cover exactly how we set up our backup in my next posting.