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For First Time, Technology Tracks Growth of Desktop Linux
Linspire, Inc. has announced
a plan to count Linux desktop users, at least those running Linspire. When
a computer running Linspire connects to the Internet the IP address is
converted into map coordinates and a "lightup" appears in the corresponding
location on a satellite photograph of the Earth. The map can be seen at lraiser.com.
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For First Time, Technology Tracks Growth of Desktop Linux Posted Oct 14, 2004 18:57 UTC (Thu) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] Very cool looking web app...
For First Time, Technology Tracks Growth of Desktop Linux Posted Oct 14, 2004 19:24 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] It's a little tricky, because the background earth-at-night image they use has a bunch of little bright dots on it that, on closer inspection, aren't actually representative of Linux users but of actual lights visible from space. The Linspire users are _red_ dots, and there's a lot fewer of 'em.
For First Time, Technology Tracks Growth of Desktop Linux Posted Oct 14, 2004 20:38 UTC (Thu) by kyuso (guest, #23894) [Link] This seems to show only those Linspire users who happen to connect to the internet the first time after the OS install, according to the report.
It could have been nice to set the color contrast between actual light and Linspire users, and keep old 'starters' with another color, to see the actual 'increase' of Linspire users, rather than showing only 'new' users.
For First Time, Technology Tracks Growth of Desktop Linux Posted Oct 14, 2004 19:56 UTC (Thu) by uriel (guest, #20754) [Link] Maybe if you run that aberration called Flash. It certainly wont get anywhere near any of the boxes I admin.
For First Time, Technology Tracks Growth of Desktop Linux Posted Oct 14, 2004 19:58 UTC (Thu) by uriel (guest, #20754) [Link] oh, found the .gif images, hmmm.. they could at least show that by default if you don't have Flash installed.
For First Time, Technology Tracks Growth of Desktop Linux Posted Oct 15, 2004 16:54 UTC (Fri) by jeld (guest, #22397) [Link] Whats wrong with flash? The format is open, only the editor is proprietory.
flash is not open! Posted Oct 15, 2004 19:00 UTC (Fri) by nealmcb (subscriber, #20740) [Link] Flash is not open, even though a proprietary company has shared historial snapshots of the swf format that is part of the flash platform.
The kind of "open" technology that drove the success of the Internet, and that I like to use and promote, is one in which the specs are defined by an open body like the IETF. Formats which are specified by proprietary companies and remain under their control will evolve in ways that give them an advantage over their competition, in ways that hurt users. Note that macromedia does not open up the plugin and "source" format ("fla") for the animations (vs the "object" format that swf represents.)
See http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/05/24/swf... for more info (see especially the comments on page 2).
svg, on the other hand, is open, more useful and innovative, and stymied by the dominance of the closed flash platform.
flash is not open! Posted Oct 15, 2004 19:36 UTC (Fri) by jeld (guest, #22397) [Link] This is a bit ridiculous. Macromedia is a commercial company, and they need to keep their IP from competitors. That includes source code for the Flash development environment and Flash player. FLA is the format Flash development environment uses to store "work in progress" and as such is closed. One does not NEED to know FLA to generate Flash content. Now, since SWF has became a sort of a "de facto" standard, Macromedia made the file format OPEN to developers. That means that any person or group may write their own Flash player or Flash development environment without Macromedia consent or knowledge. What else do you want? I have read the license for the SWF specifications and the only restrictions it seems to have is that wherever you make a product that reads/imports/exports/generates SWF you must call it Macromedia SWF (I think it is a reasonable attempt to keep Macromedia name associated with their IP) and that SWF produced by your software should conform with the specification to the extent that it doesn't generate errors when read using Macromedia player software (which is also a reasonable request, since Macromedia makes certain support obligations to its customers). What else do you want? That they completely surrender the control of their format to some sort of comitee? Why should they they spent money on the R&D, they opened the specs, to make competition fair, why should they let some bunch of people screw up their format?
flash is not open! Posted Oct 15, 2004 21:24 UTC (Fri) by nealmcb (subscriber, #20740) [Link] Hmmm. Someone was frustrated about pages that rely on users to have a flash plugin installed.
You asked
Whats wrong with flash? The format is open, only the editor is proprietory.
I was simply trying to answer that and point out why I think that flash is not open in the way that other web technologies are open. I wasn't trying to accuse Macromedia of wrongdoing. Just pointing out that I agree that Internet users and web page designers are disadvantaged by the lack of openness in this technology, compared to SVG. I think the parallels to Windows and Linux are obvious.
Plenty of companies manage to make money off of truly open technologies. I'm just trying to encourge people to support good open technology like svg, rather than more closed technologies like flash, where they will always be playing catch-up with the company that controls its evolution. The article I cited also gives lots of reasons why svg is a better technology, along with some of the plusses of flash. Having an open, standards-based source language is one of those advantages.
flash is not open! Posted Oct 18, 2004 0:26 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] SVG is more innovative, true... Usefull... hardly. I have working flash plugin for Linux (binary-only, true, but working). I do not have good SVG plugin for Linux (there are more or less working one for Windows - and even this is hard to find. This is the same story as with Postscript and/or PDF: yes, they are controlled by one company but there are no usefull alternative and pdftex + xpdf work for me much better then some other "totally open" technologies. As long as there are no good support for SVG at least in Firefox we can forget about SVG.
flash is not open! Posted Oct 23, 2004 18:44 UTC (Sat) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] You can compile Mozilla with SVG support. In Gentoo, it's easy, you put "mozsvg" in your USE flags. It seems to work well; the main problem is there's not much SVG content on the Net!
Similar could be done with Linux Counter data Posted Oct 15, 2004 6:30 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] A map based on the venerable Linux counter (http://counter.li.org/) would be more comprehensive, as it is not limited to some distro. It already contains enough geographical data for map-making. On the other hand, it lists only somewhat active users, as the data is entered manually.I agree with the complaints about the lraiser.com graphical presentation. Separating the Linux dots from the others is impossible especialy if you are somewhat red-green colourblind (like I and a significant percentage of the male population). In general, any time you want to present statistics graphically and want to maximise the number of people that can understand it, make sure the presentation works even after it is converted to grayscale.
Similar could be done with Linux Counter data Posted Oct 15, 2004 10:03 UTC (Fri) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link] About 5% I believe and about 0.25% for the ladies. (I think this figure includes all colour blindness varieties, but I understand red-green is the majority of them)
Incidentally, about the same number of ladies (0.25%) are not only not colour blind, but actually are able to see subtle distinctions between shades of blue that the rest of us can't, due to having a fourth variety of cone cell in the retina. So in a sense, 99.875% of the world population is blue-blue colourblind and around 2.628% of those are *also* red-green or whatever else colourblind!
Confusing, eh?
Cheers & God bless
Similar could be done with Linux Counter data Posted Oct 15, 2004 17:29 UTC (Fri) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link] able to see subtle distinctions between shades of blue that the rest of us can't,That must be where this mysterious color between blue and purple comes from that some people call "indigo" but to me just looks like dark blue, ie an intensity difference rather than chromatic difference like blue vs green or blue vs purple. I wonder if these people have a problem with color images just not looking right, since most printed and all monitor/film images are based on just three colors, not four.
For First Time, Technology Tracks Growth of Desktop Linux Posted Oct 15, 2004 8:23 UTC (Fri) by beejaybee (guest, #1581) [Link] I don't suppose this offends against the privacy of individual users?
Is this not the sort of "spyware" which even the US administration voted unanimously to ban only this week?
Spyware Posted Oct 15, 2004 8:53 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] No kidding! Linspire seems to take many cues, both good and bad, fromMSWormOS. I'd call this phoning home upon first net connection "bad". Well, there are several reasons Linspire hasn't been very popular in the general geek Linux community. This is one for the list. Others include not enough encouragement not to run constantly as root (altho they've gotten better at that, from the articles I read), and a shrink-wrap pay per package software orientation MSWormOS users might be comfortable with, but Linux veterans consider one of the MSWormOS curses. Duncan (who earlier this year switched from Mandrake to Gentoo)
For First Time, Technology Tracks Growth of Desktop Linux Posted Oct 15, 2004 9:20 UTC (Fri) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] Hmm...I don't think it is. It's not different from when you run Gentoo's emerge sync or Debians apt-get. You connect to get updates. I believe Suse does the same too. You could create a map based on your website logs too.
Furthermore it's not exactly accurate and they don't publish any info, basically they are just publishing dots on a map :)
Linspire"activation" spyware Posted Oct 16, 2004 9:28 UTC (Sat) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] .. Only Linspire (from the articles I've read) does it based on initialconnection, a la MS' "activation", not upon update, which after all /could/ be set up to an unofficial non-distrib mirror. Gentoo has a rather large mirror network, much of it run (as with the distrib as a whole, given it is community based) by volunteers not tightly connected to Gentoo. Likewise Mandrake, with all sorts of independent mirrors. Linspire is Debian based, and a competent Debian admin shouldn't find it difficult to point it to a free Debian mirror, rather than or in addition to the additional dollar based Linspire Click-N-Run site. However, even if they did that, if they didn't specifically disable the "light-up" call-home to Linspire at initial connect, it'd still do that, again, MS eXPrivacy "activation" style, regardless of whether it had been pointed elsewhere for updates, or not. At least, that's how I interpret the articles I've read on the subject. Duncan
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