A Quote from Nathanial Borenstein made me laugh:
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.
So in other words, you need to be nice to us “computer professionals.”
Almost everyone has heard of Mozilla. The Mozilla organization is the descendant of Netscape and is the producer of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. One of the little known technologies behind the Mozilla products is called XUL (pronounced zool). XUL is a scripting language (and interpreter) that provides all the user interface for Firefox and Thunderbird. It’s very powerful and several stand-alone applications have been built with it.
So recently, some Mozilla developers tossed around the idea of creating a new desktop environment built on the XUL technology. This would not only compete with Gnome and KDE, but also with Windows, Mac OSX and many of the other platforms. Because the heart of the Mozilla technologies has been ported to all kinds of different platforms, this new desktop could potentially run on many of the diverse kernels (the software that connects all other software applications with the hardware — the heart of an operating system).
This would be amazing! The Mozilla Desktop (has a nice ring to it) would provide a universal interface to many different platforms. Regardless of the underlying technology, the user experience would be the same. And XUL could handle all the intricacies of the diverse platforms. Windows users could more easily switch to Linux or Max OSX (or Solaris for that matter) without having to relearn an interface.
Of course, there are all kinds of issues that would need to be worked out in order for this to really work, but it’s the best start to a centralized user interface that we’ve ever seen.
So what do you think? For you tech guys, do you think this is feasible? And for you non-techies, is this something you would like?
iTWire – Microsoft strengthens Windows lock-in with JPEG rival
When I saw the above article, I became a little frustrated. As I continued to read, I became just plain ole’ furious. Why do they continue to do this? Don’t they realize that platform lock-in is a bad thing? They started their business off the opposite way. And the openness of the PC is what has brought about the PC revolution and in turn the Internet revolution.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about this.
That would make two of my former employers swallowed up by Oracle (PeopleSoft and Novell). At first glance, I didn’t like the thought of Larry Ellison having any type of influence in Happy Valley. But as I considered this more and more, I realized that it might be a really good move for Novell employees.
I just realized that I didn’t post a conclusion to my fun with my re-partitioned USB hard drive. So here it is…
I ended up grabbing a software package to undelete after a reformat and other accidents. I tried a couple of them and went back to something I had used in the past, Active Undelete .
It worked, but not very easily and not completly. I was able to see my files, but when I attempted to recover the main folders, it didn’t work. So I tried individual files. Hey, that worked, but what a pain. So I came to a realization that it worked on some folders and not others.
In trying to recover the data I killed when doing my brilliant work detailed in my last post, I remembered by LinkStation.
So about 1.5 – 2 years ago, I purchased a Buffalo LinkStation
Within a few months, the thing stopped working. It just wouldn’t respond when I booted it up. Lights would flash and then nothing. So I called Buffalo Tech Support and after several attempts at upgrading the firmware, eventually I got a tech that indicated that there was a hard-drive problem.
1. DON’T LEAVE YOUR USB DRIVE PLUGGED IN WHEN REINSTALLING A SYSTEM WITH WHICH YOU ARE UNFAMILIAR
Yeah… that was yelling. Really at myself, not at you.
So my brother-in-law brings his laptop to my house to wipe it out, reformat and reinstall Windows XP. No biggy, right. So we plug in my USB Hard Drive to backup all his data. It was going to be easy, right. Back it up, then once done installing, pull all the data back over. Nice and simple.