Posts tagged: RANTS

When I came across Distro of the Month I started thinking that maybe there’s a problem with the number of Linux distributions.

Distrowatch.com tracks approximately 372 different Linux distributions. At one per month, it would take 31 years to make it through the list – assuming that no new distributions arrive during that time, which I’m afraid is wishful thinking.

Distrowatch’s How Independent Is Your Distribution page boils the numbers down some – 129 of those 372 are based on Debian, for instance. Even so, you’ve got four or five years of work ahead of you there if you just want to sample the major families plus independent distributions like Puppy Linux.

The title of this post is a joke, but one you’re only likely to get if you actually use one of these services: in the attention economy of link-sharing, titles that pit one thing against another tend to rise higher. (Maybe this validates the old Wired Magazine guideline of “no conflict, no story” – or maybe it proves the easiest way to get attention is to antagonize.)

Over the past few months I’ve played with both Digg and Reddit as ways to discover new and interesting stuff, and wanted to post some notes for the hypothetical reader who is even farther behind this particular curve than I am.

Several weeks ago I ranted about eBay’s problems with phishing and some things I am surprised they aren’t doing in response. I’m afraid I’ve got a similar complaint today.

I’ve been searching for a present for someone (I can’t be more specific for risk of ruining the surprise!) and noticed that many of the matching items that were coming up in my searches were being offered by sellers in the UK. At least that’s what I assumed, because the prices were in Pounds sterling.

Russell Beattie has posted a rant about Web 2.0 startups. I actually disagree with much of his critique (he veers toward “640K should be enough for anyone” territory more than once), but the rough taxonomy is useful in sorting the heaps of new companies and projects.

Seeing a QuickTime upgrade show up in Software Update today reminded me that I’d been meaning to briefly rant about the split between Quicktime and QuickTime Pro and what a silly anachronism it is. John Siracusa said it best in his Ars Technica review of OS X 10.4:

Mac OS X ships with a complete integrated development environment that supports C, C++, Objective-C, Java, and all of the APIs in Mac OS X (not to mention distributed compiling, a GUI design and layout tool, and a suite of performance monitoring applications). Tiger includes a free web browser, e-mail client, address book, dictionary, thesaurus, font manager, and AIM/Jabber instant message client. When you buy an iMac you get all of the above plus iLife: iPhoto, iMovie, Garage Band, and iDVD.