Mostly The Lonely Howls Of Mike Baying His Ideological Purity At The Moon
Hardly a couple days can go by without some horror story about the latest Android malware. The one I think I saw most recently was a story about how Android faces more malware attacks than PCs in the United States. Now, besides sounding like click bate and total fiction, I find that I don’t really care about Android malware. Quite the contrary, I’m grateful for it.
Grateful for malware?!? Yep, and here’s why.
A while ago, The Linux Foundation announced a plan to allow for Linux to boot on systems with Secure Boot enabled. Lately, it has come to light that Microsoft is screwing with The Linux Foundation, and not granting the key required despite the fact that The Linux Foundation has already paid for it. Oddly enough, certain Microsoft apologists still believe that this is the fault of The Linux Foundation, despite the fact that there is nothing to support that contention. Here is a list of links that disagree with that fantasy.
It's been an interesting couple days on the processor front, and many think that these past couple days haven't been all together positive. While I can see where that impression may be gotten pretty easily, I'm here to say one very simple thing. It just doesn't matter.
First, this is what happened.
On September 13th, as part of their Intel Developer Forum, Intel claimed that Clover Trail ”is a Windows 8 chip” and that “the chip cannot run Linux”. Clover Trail is a new version of the Atom processor, which is used in tablets for the most part. Claiming the processor is “a Windows 8 chip” seems a bit odd considering Microsoft's complete lack of a presence in the tablet market. Intel later clarified their position saying, ”Intel has plans for another version of this platform directed at Linux/Android; however we are not commenting on the platform specifics or market segments that at this time. Stay tuned.” It's unclear if this was the original intent, or a reaction.
AMD's Hondo Processor Will Only Support Windows 8
Shortly after the announcement from Intel regarding the Clover Trail processor, AMD came out with their own claims regarding their own Hondo processor. Steve Belt (corporate VP of ultra low power products at AMD) said, “This is a Windows 8 product, only. We're not doing Android on this platform, at least not now.” Again, the Hondo processor is a processor aimed at the tablet market, which Microsoft has zero presence in. He went on to say, “It is a conscious decision not to go after Android. We think the Windows 8 space has a lot of opportunity, there's plenty of TAM [total addressable market] there for us to go at. So we don't need to spread ourselves into other markets, we think Windows 8 is a great place to start. Down the road we may look at Android, right now we're focused on Windows 8.”
So the big question on everybody's mind is, what does this mean for Linux and Android? The answer is much more simple than you'd imagine. What does it actually mean for Linux and Android? Answer: “Not a damn thing.” While Intel claims that here will be an Android specific version of Clover Trail available shortly and AMD is banking on Microsoft, it really doesn't matter.
Linux, and by extension Android, will run on whatever its developers want it to run on. Intel didn't help out Linus Torvalds when he originally wrote the operating system in the 90s, and Linux developers don't need Intel's help now. I have full confidence that there is a Linux developer out there that could write a version of Linux that can run on my toaster if he or she so chose. Support from the company is not a requirement for Linux or Android.
Think I'm wrong? I'd love to hear from you in the comments.
Today both Google and Oracle submitted filings to the court detailing individuals that they pay to blog on their side. Google doesn't pay anybody. Oracle pays Florian Mueller.
The Olympics are known throughout the world and have been going on for centuries. The first Olympic games were thought to have occurred in the sixth century BC, and it consisted of foot races only. It started as a race for young women to compete for the honor of being a priestess for the goddess, Hera. A second race was run for young men for the right to be a consort for the priestess.
Now, where were we? Oh yea, so the day before yesterday (I know I said I was going to do this daily, but the series finale of Eureka was on!) we covered what's commonly thought of as the traditional Unix file permission. Permissions are applied using chmod, and can be seen as a -rwxrwxrwx at the front of the line after doing an ls -l.
First, a little side story. I like messing around with my Linux computer. I have fun just seeing what the operating system can do. I like to talk about what I find, probably because learning new things excites me. I get giddy when I find out something new about something that's familiar. Unfortunately, in my house, no one cares but me. I sometimes try telling my wife about it, but to say she doesn't care is an understatement. She doesn't even pretend to pay attention when I'm talking any more.