I worked as a consultant for a while for an ill fated company called GlobalPC. The goal of the company was creating a PC that was easier to use than Windows for the 50% of Americans who don't own a PC. The goal was admirable. The technology that they were using (GEOS) was also admirable, but was old, had a tiny developer community and was an incredible pain to debug apps in (object oriented x86 assembly). There were some great dedicated people at the company, but it ran out of money and was sold to some dubious characters from Florida, who were never able to get enough money to get the product to market, but found enough money to keep the company alive for over a year and to drive the stock price up to $30 at one point (See MYTN history). Somebody made money from it. ( I can't complain, I did just fine as a consultant. And I had a lot of fun putting together their internet portal).
The Holy Grail of the company was to get their Global PC for sale for $299 at WalMart, and the sales and marketing guys worked long and hard on trying to get that to happen, without success (you need to guarantee you can make the units before Walmart will commit).
Today I see that Walmart is offering a PC running Lindows for $299 on their site. The price includes AMD Duron 850 Mhz CPU, 128 MB memory, 10 GB hard drive, CD-ROM drive, Ethernet connection, 56 Kbps modem, and Lindows operating system -- does not include floppy disk drive or monitor. Pretty good deal - a lot better hardware than the GlobalPC was going to be able to provide.
It seems like a real milestone for Linux and for Lindows to have Walmart shipping computers based on them. I wonder who will buy them and for what reason? The GlobalPC people were targeting the lower half of the market, people who were disenfranchised by the prices of computers and how hard they were to use. I am curious if this is who Walmart is targeting. If someone sees any of their marketing material, I'd love to hear about it.
Thanks to Cory for the link. After posting this, saw the Slashdot discussion of the same story. Pretty vapid discussion.
I copied Radio from the D: drive of my home computer onto the C:drive of my laptop that I am taking with me on vacation, then, as advised by Lawrence Lee, ran Andy Fragen's myFixFilePathsAndAddresses script. Had to download the script using Opera because IE was treating it as text, and had to manually change the MyPictures setting, but otherwise it seems to have worked. We'll see, but I am impressed to start.
I'm going out of town for a couple of weeks. I may try to copy Radio over to the laptop that I'll be bringing with me, but I don't know if I dare. So don't be surprised if there aren't any entries for a couple of weeks. Check back around July 4.
The SF Chronicle last weekend published an 8 page special section on how the FBI and Governor Reagan worked together to stomp the student movement at Cal in the 60's, and to smear Clark Kerr's name with disinformation. A good and timely reminder of why all the restrictions that Ashcroft just took off the FBI were put on in the first place.
See: http://sfgate.com/news/special/pages/2002/campusfiles/
Excerpts:
According to the Washington Post, Bush has decided to have the military hold Jose Padilla, US citizen, indefinitely, and not to put him on trial. Bush claims "even citizens can qualify as "enemy combatants" the legal term the Justice Department argues allows a person to be held without trial" and "the executive branch alone has the power to decide when a person qualifies as a combatant".
It turns out, according to another Washington Post article, that Ashcroft had planned to try Padilla, but didn't have enough evidence. The Justice department held him for a month in jail, but two days before the Justice department was going to be required to bring him to a secret hearing in front of a judge, they declared him a "enemy combatant" and transferred him to the military.
When the President can declare a citizen an enemy and have the army grab him and lock him up, we aren't living in a democracy.
Well, today I finally anted up that $40 to Userland and purchased Radio. I did this just after losing half an hour's work to the click away from the browser and lose your work feature that Scott Johnson warns so eloquently about. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C -- I'm doing my best to remember. Actually, half the time now I compose in NoteTab then copy to the edit window. I guess I should blame the whole thing on Scott - it was his writing that convinced me to try Radio in the first place.
I fought against buying Radio. I have another blog going using Movable Type, and it is very easy to do categories, change styles, add pictures, send out notifications, and just enter text. It just works, and I had it figured out enough to use after about 30 minutes, and it only took me 30 minutes to change the template to something I can live with. With Radio on the other hand, I still haven't figured out how to change the templates (as you can see), or how all the different files are inter-related. I have lost work several times. Things often don't work the way I think they should, and sometimes it seems like the program just sits there when I have told it do something. Technical support is iffy, although someone named Lawrence Lee seems to do a great job responding sometime. So why buy Radio?
I like playing with toys, and it's clear that Radio is going to be a great toy. As an experienced software development manager, I shudder in fear sometimes at Dave Winer's new feature of the day approach, especially as he builds up his user base - the costs of a mistake are probably growing logarithmically. However, I feel like I am living on the cutting edge (sometimes the bleeding edge) of what is happening with web logging, and that is lots of fun. Plus, I am getting to learn a lot, which is also fun. Finally, it's only $40 bucks. I've spent a lot more for a lot worse toys.
I don't understand the current media obsession with weblogs, and I am quite tired of reading about them, and tired of the obsessions some people have about trying to straighten other people out about them. Still, after reading my weblog, both this one, and the family one that I am keeping, my mother asked me what a weblog was. I told her, and referred her to the history of weblogs document on the Userland site. Still, I saw the article that Dave Winer pointed to today, What We're Doing When We Blog, and I agree with him - it is a nice concise description of the whole phenomenon. Mom, are you reading? :-)