MOBODOJO

Little frustrates me more than a projects inability to properly document itself. You might think that this is something which is limited to the few pundits such as myself and that most people who report on technology don’t have such issues. I beg to differ. I have conferred with a number of my colleagues and confirmed that this is an ongoing issue. Of course, this is not a rant regarding documentation, or its lack thereof, in the open source community, but of a particular issue.

I could, without question, rage on about the rampant apathy amongst so-called community support boards when regular contributors are faced with an issue they are unfamiliar with or that a coder believes they have satisfied the burden of documentation by installing a wiki, but just pointing out these related issues will remain sufficient. I speak instead of the lack of simple documentation of configuring a passwordless SSH client session in Dropbear inside of Busybox.

The situation is simple. I’ve been testing VMware’s pleasant ESXi virtualization platform and have started to look into associated projects and management tools. One such tool is OpenQRM, what appears to be a very promising open source project which was born of commercial roots. It employs PHP and MySQL for its web-based interface and has a rather extensive plug-in architecture which supports, among a host of others, VMware’s ESX/ESXi. In order for OpenQRM to see these servers, however, I must enable passwordless SSH.

Continue reading Of Dropbear, Busybox, and passwordless SSH

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been reading an article or op/ed or whatever, and someone makes a comparison or allusion to Apple. These people clearly aren’t Apple people, but they aren’t the all out Apple bashers who think anything other than Windows is a festering lump of crap. They just don’t get it. They have this fundamental misunderstanding about what Apple is. I get it today in a piece on Ubuntu 10.4 and its new UI design in the pages of TechRepublic. Jack Wallen says:

“But take a look at what the public is buying en mass – Apple. Why? Because they place an importance on aesthetics few other companies can match.”

Ignoring the fact that he starts a sentence with “but” and misspells en masse, he’s telling his readers that Apple’s sales are based on aesthetics. Really, truly and honestly? Maybe I shouldn’t take it personally. After all, he could just be writing poorly overall, and that alone could cause his point to be lost in the maelstrom of unedited copy. I’d like to think that were the case, but I have a feeling its not. Could it be that there are people out there who don’t understand that Apple is about utility?

I feel that a brief recap of what Apple is would not be wasted on those who don’t get it, and even for some who do. Apple is a hardware company. They make computers and consumer electronics. This is the exact same market companies like HP, Dell, Sony, Toshiba, and others play in. Unlike these other companies, though, Apple has long recognized that their customers don’t want to look like dorks lugging around a load of gear.

So, while the exterior of Apple products remains attractive and sexy, the inside is a very different animal. Apple works hard to prevent most users from having to install drivers and fiddle with loads of extra configurations. They also design the interface to get out of your way. In Mac OS X, when I click on an application icon in the Dock, I get that application. In Windows 7, I get a sub-list of windows thumbnails I can pick from, giving me an extra step and forcing me to take longer because I need to squint at them. Ymmv.

I’m going to wrap up my rant there, but I’ll end on the old saw about the so-called “Apple Premium” that a lot of people think you pay to get something from Apple. You don’t. Plain and simple. You will pay the same for an equivalent machine from Dell or HP. The point is that Apple doesn’t make cheap shit like Dell and HP do. So, as my daughter would say:

Take that, Thomas Jefferson!

I just got done reading Mark Gibb’s Backspin piece on the iPad, and I have to agree with him on a number of counts. Well, except one. Is Apple a monopoly in waiting? Is Apple on the fringes of Federal destruction because its violating Anti Trust laws? Are the wolves lingering in the trees waiting for the right moment to unleash their judicial fury?

No.

I’m not saying that Apple should be allowed to continue its current, as Mark puts it, “walled garden strategy”. No company should be allowed to control that much of any market (ahem… Microsoft!) while at the same time controlling the reins of the entirety of said market. I submit, however, that Apple is not stupid and there are reasons to believe this.

1. Apple has been slowly and methodically winning back market share from Microsoft and has made itself an extraordinarily powerful entity with some very cunning market and product moves. Apple’s core (no pun intended) business has always been computers, but their bread and butter is the iPod. They know that. They also have no intention of blowing this position with a ridiculous claim of Anti Trust.
2. Apple won the record industry by hobbling music with DRM. Now that’s mostly gone, so you can put your iTunes music on any player that supports AAC, and most of them do. It may not be as seamless to sync a non-iPod, but its not that hard, and would be a very hard position to try and win with that in court.
3. Apple only controls a very small portion of the desktop and laptop market, despite being the top retailer for such systems now quarter after quarter. Apple’s very sharp lawyers need only indicate Microsoft’s marketshare and previous Anti Trust issues compared to their own marketshare to indicate how ludicrous the concept is that they are a monopoly.
4. Apple does use and contributes greatly to open source projects, most notably Darwin which lies at the core of its own OS, Mac OS X, and supports a number of open source initiatives. Most recently with the arrival of the iPad it has stated that the device specifically supports the ePub standard, which you can read about at WikiPedia.

Again, Apple is not stupid. They have, in my estimation, cleverly positioned themselves to be in that unique place where they are wanted and deemed needed, but aren’t required. That, I believe as I am not a lawyer and simply don’t know, is likely the difference between being an industry giant and being “invited” to Anti Trust depositions.