2 Robots

A few months ago I installed a dual-boot machine with both Linux and Windows for some friends of mine who were having perpetual spyware issues. I spoke with them recently, and it appears that the Windows install has started to s.l.o.w. down, which is pretty much what happened last time. Unfortunately, they seem to be a little more intimidated that I had thought, and I don’t think they’ve even tried using Linux yet.

The next time I visit at their house, I’ll take a look and see what the problem is with Windows, and if they’re actually using Linux or not.

Since being outpaced by HP in total sales, and knocked down from it’s #1 spot in new computer sales, Dell has launched IdeaStorm, a website where users can suggest ways for Dell to make money better cater to its customers. This is actually a great site. You can create suggestions, and then vote on which suggestions you think are the best. With over 50,000 people voting so far, Dell gets a pretty good idea of what people are interested in, and can tune their product line accordingly.

Previously, I had tried to install Linux on my friends’ computer because even after 2 reinstalls, their Windows PC had gotten so loaded down with viruses and spyware that it was unusable. This had lead me to wonder how many people out there have the same problem, and what can be done about it. Also, it sort of annoys me that a computer can have so much spyware and viruses on it that it just isn’t fast enough to do anything useful anymore.

I’m planning a trip to visit my friends for a holiday party. They have a computer which always gets infested so badly with spyware that it takes 10 minutes or more to boot up and is virtually unusable. I’ve reloaded Windows on it twice for them so far, but whatever they’re doing that gets it infected, they can’t seem to stop. So, I’m taking a new tactic.

So of course, the financial news world is buzzing with Larry Ellison’s announcement that Oracle will be selling their own flavor of Linux: Unbreakable Linux, which they freely admit will be pretty much stolen from Red Hat and sold for about half the price at the entry level. Here is why investors are wrong, and Red Hat really has nothing to worry about.

We recently got an Averatec 2200 laptop, which is a pretty sweet device. It’s small, fast, and moreover, has a great feel to the keyboard. Unfortunately, it keeps locking up in Linux, and the wireless card doesn’t seem to get recognized when I installed Ubuntu 6.06. Because I want to do a lot of unix-like [...]