Very few millionaires, and even less billionaires, are willing to invest the same time and effort into giving away their money as they put into making it. Some, for example Ingvar Kamprad, the owner of Ikea, spend very little of their money and concentrate solely on making more money, or on driving their business forward. These people are obsessed with success and so have no time for anything else. What I like about Bill Gates is that he has spent his fortune on himself – he has an absolutely amazing house – and also on helping others. He has always split his money this way, and when he had all that he could possibly want then he, along with his wife, has invested a lot of effort and time into putting his money to good use.

What Bill Gates has done through Microsoft is remarkable – he has created a world where computers are commonplace and very usable – but what his gates Foundation will achieve, with its massive fortune, has yet to be seen. It is possible that his charity work will be more memorable than his 30 years at Microsoft. As described here, Bill Gates has effectively taxed every PC user in order to fund his philanthropy. I salute Bill Gates for having realised his dream and then having the strength to do some good around the world.

Have a read of this article, there are some more links in some of the comments, there’s even a video link in one:

The problem is that these are cable/DSL routers, designed to connect to a cable modem such as those supplied by Virginmedia, and cable networks use DHCP to assign IP addresses. This is fine, and is a standard that has been around for almost as long as there have been IP addresses, but there was a small bug in the DHCP client in Dynamode’s firmware which meant that it keeps rejecting the IP’s it is offered and requesting new ones. This seriously buggers up a DHCP, which would cause slowdowns on the network and a problem for other users of the DHCP as there are no IP’s available for them and the DHCP is running slowly.

Fortunately there is an easy solution: updating the firmware on the Dynamode BR-6004 W-G1 router will fix it for you and other Virginmedia customers. However, finding instructions online is nigh on impossible – which is why I have now created a site to provide the firmware and guide you through the process of upgrading your router’s firmware. Just pop along to http://alonline.eu and follow the instructions there.

Better at “fun stuff”, my arse.

The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye.

I do agree with a lot of the points made in this article, especially the bit about Mac users claiming that Macs are “just better” than PC’s – and so, in order to counter that argument, I hereby include a link to an article on how to build the equivalent of a Mac for not a lot of money.

On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:

> I’m very interested too, though I’ll have to agree with Larry
> that Linux really isn’t going anywhere in particular and seems
> to be making progress through sheer luck.

 

Hey, that’s not a bug, that’s a FEATURE!

You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is?

Guess what – it’s not Linux, it’s not Solaris, and it’s not your car.

It’s you. And me.

And think about how you and me actually came about – not through any complex design.

Right. “sheer luck”.

Well, sheer luck, AND:
- free availability and _crosspollination_ through sharing of “source code”, although biologists call it DNA.
- a rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd  (biologists often call this “survival of the fittest”)
- massive undirected parallel development (“trial and error”)

I’m deadly serious: we humans have _never_ been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking.

Don’t underestimate the power of survival of the fittest.

And don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.

Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their
engineering practices or their coding style.

                Linus

After the break you will find more of my rants on Linux, Ubuntu and Kubuntu – all of which are worth reading. But if you want another, very reasonable, point of view then have a look at this article.

Unfortunately, Linux has always had one major problem: it was never easy to install, configure or use, and it didn’t support the hardware you might have in your computer. Which meant that although I dabbled with Linux, I would always return to Windows to do anything serious, or to play games, or just to be able to use easily. Things, however, have recently got a lot better, and I have to say that Ubuntu has helped dramatically with this improvement. I used to use Mandrake, which was based on Red Hat, because it at least came with a reasonable installer. I’d rather not use the command line, if at all possible, and Mandrake had a nifty graphical installation that worked most of the time. Now Ubuntu comes with a nifty graphical installer that seems to work almost all the time, which is great.

Once installed I find it boots a lot quicker than Windows XP, has almost every application that I need, is secure and actually has a few more features than Windows:

• boot time, on a reasonable system (Pentium 4 @ 2.66GHz and 512MB RAM) is around 1 minute, which beats my main Windows machine by a full minute;
• applications I use regularly include Webmin for remote access and control, Apache and MySQL, and KTorrent for downloading those useful bits and pieces;
• Adept package manager is the equivalent of Windows Update, but it updates any software you have on the system, and not just basic components;
• multiple desktops – I don’t use them much, but they can be really useful if you developing something, and you want to use the Internet at the same time;
• there’s a piece of software to do just about anything you need to do – I was amazed the other day when I double clicked on a piece of DivX media I had downloaded. On Windows you need to install the DivX codecs, and then struggle to set up file associations. On Kubuntu I double clicked on a DivX film and Kaffeine popped up and played it without a moment’s hesitation, and I had not installed any extra software since installing Kubuntu.

I have slowly, but surely, become more and more impressed with Kubuntu since I installed the latest version (7.10 – Gutsy Gibbon). When I had first installed Ubuntu it had always had a habit of freeziing, which I was certain was related to the PC’s power management, and it’s hibernation settings. However, 7.10 had resolved all these problems, and I now had an OS that  I can leave on all the time without worrying about it crashing, freezing or failing to respond. It also does everything that I need it to do, often quicker than Windows (and never slower), and with genuine solidity. When I build my next PC I intend to run Kubuntu on it as my rpimary OS, and I will boot XP through VMWare for those applications which still remain Windows only.

I really cannot emphasise enough how good Kubuntu really is. Most of what I have just written can be applied to Ubuntu in general, but I find the KDE desktop so much better than the Gnome desktop, which is why I would advise you to use Kubuntu. The argument against the QT desktop toolkit was removed years ago, and the QT toolkit produces such excellent results that I cannot see why people would not use it. However, Linux is all about choice, so if you choose Ubuntu, with the Gnome desktop instead, then that’s fine with me. What would make me happy is if you actually tried using a Ubuntu derived OS on your PC – you can dual boot it, so you don’t need to lose Windows. There’s really no argument for not using Linux any more, and Ubuntu is now the best way of using Linux. So try it as soon as you can.

I’m currently writing this on a PC that is 4 and a half years old, and it still does everything I want it to do. It’s got a 2.53GHz Pentium 4, with 1GB RAM and a 120GB HDD – which was top-spec in 2002, but is not too bad a spec even now. I’m starting to worry that the hard drive will fail soon, but I have everything backed up, both locally and online, and I have plans for a new PC next year. What’s different now is that 4-5 years ago you would have to upgrade your PC every other year in order to be able to use the latest software, or play the latest games. Now, whilst my graphics card would not give anywhere near the same performance as a modern card, I could still run a modern game at a reasonable resolution to be playable, and productive software hasn’t required any enhancements for many years.

As PCs last longer, and specs fail to improve at anywhere near the levels they used to, I can see PC sales declining around the world. As mobile broadband technologies, such as HSDPA, start to roll out then their prices will come down, and soon Internet and email access on your phone will be commonplace. Once it is, I cannot see PC sales holding their current volume, as user will had little or no need to upgrade.

I’d also like to point out that new Linux distributions, particularly Ubuntu, are giving life to old PCs, which once again will reduce sales of new PCs. I have been using Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) for a month now, and I almost prefer it to Windows XP. When I build my new PC next year I will install Ubuntu first, and then run XP or Vista in a virtual machine. This will give me the best of both worlds, and will allow greater security and flexibility. It will also require less expenditure as I won’t need to buy the latest, and most expensive, graphics card or motherboard.