http://www.johnlange.ca The rants, raves, and musings of John Lange Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:22:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Just a quick follow up to my post from yesterday about just how disruptive Android is going to be. I spotted a story today on Engadget that talks about how Motorola is planning to put Android on it's set top boxesматраци. As an interesting side note; the article correctly points out ... http://www.johnlange.ca/2010/02/19/android-on-the-march/ If anyone had doubts about the impact Google is having on the mobile space, the Mobile World Congress (MWC) should have put those doubts to rest. Ad revenue from Android phones are the fastest growing segment of the mobile ad space and mobile carriers are starting to make some disturbing pronouncements ... http://www.johnlange.ca/2010/02/17/android-isnt-just-tipping-over-apples-cart/ It seems that with the launch of the iPod in 2001, the whole world forgot that until that point, Apple had not had a hit product since the Apple IIc. In fact, the company was such a looser it was flirting with bankruptcy. Failure after failure meant things were so ... http://www.johnlange.ca/2010/01/29/ipad-idud-apples-latest-flop/ I've hacked up a little program to track the accuracy of weather forecasts in an attempt to determine if the forecasting computer models are flawed. It's no secret that predicting the weather is hard and even the experts frequently get it wrong, but I seem to be noticing that when they ... http://www.johnlange.ca/2010/01/21/are-weather-forcasts-too-hot/ As predicted, the government mismanagement of the technology portfolio is turning into a disaster that just keeps on giving. Today, the first lawsuits was filed. To my surprise, it was one of the new entrants, Public Mobile who launched the first lawsuit (I expected it to be one of the ... http://www.johnlange.ca/2010/01/13/let-the-wireless-lawsuits-begin/ I recently had the need to query a bunch of UPSes to gather their current statistics using openSUSE. The Network UPS Tools packages (NUT for short) are available for openSUSE and that's all you need (assuming your UPS is one of the supported ones). # zypper install nut Next you need to ... http://www.johnlange.ca/2009/12/07/ups-monitoring-with-suse-quick-dirty/ Time and again, the Conservative government has demonstrated it is completely clueless when it comes to technology policy. Case in point, one of the first things the Conservatives did was to ignore recommendations to lift foreign ownership restrictions in the telcom sector. That recommendation was originally in a report commissioned by ... http://www.johnlange.ca/2009/11/16/canadian-government-continues-to-bungle-technology-portfolio/ The Gnome desktop in OpenSUSE 11.2 is beautiful (much nicer than the clunky KDE IMHO), but there are a few things that I don't like about the default settings. I use 8 virtual desktops to keep my desktop organized but I like the taskbar to show all tasks. By default, ... http://www.johnlange.ca/2009/11/16/suse-11-2-tweak-show-all-tasks-on-gnome-panel/ Canada's cable companies today filed comments with the CRTC in which they release the results of a study the conducted into the residential VOIP market in Canada. In short, it found that residential VOIP "failed to catch on" and that "market research reveals a market in decline, rather than one ... http://www.johnlange.ca/2009/11/06/residential-voip-is-dead/ Canada's equivalent of the US's FCC, the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) released a highly flawed decision that gives Canada's ISPs the green light to shape and throttle internet traffic. The reaction from consumers has been swift and negative. At the time, this was the most commented on story on ... http://www.johnlange.ca/2009/10/30/canadas-crtc-rules-against-network-neutrality/