Computing Pages

  1. I've started writing a small blog based on my experiences with Mandriva GNU/Linux 2007.
  2. July 2007 marks the first anniversary of my escape from Autonomy corporation, in Cowley Road, Cambridge. I found the workplace to be oppressive with an undercurrent of bullying, being driven by greed and market forces. Basically, if you can't deliver on time, you're out. Quite disgusting, in my opinion. I had heard stories of people who had taken the company to court because of work practises, but that the company had settled out of court to prevent these stories leaking out. My own attempts at justice resulted in threatening legal letters, and the ultimate bullying of BT Internet to close down my web and email access by Autonomy's lawyers, Allen and Overy. This is horrifying, and something that should not be allowed. So, to the bullies at Autonomy (Abigail Betley, Sean Blanchflower, Andrew Kanter and, allegedly, Mike Lynch): no company should ever be allowed to bully employees and exert legal action in an attempt to silence immoral practises.
    The article can be found here.

    3. Update: late August 2008
    Yet another bullying letter from Allen and Overy demanding that I remove the "defamatory" article, even though it is hosted on another server, well outside their wicked grasp. However, Autonomy Corporation found out about this page over a year after it was put up (so much for them being a "premier" search company!) and Allen and Overy took a week and a half to respond to the items on this page, and the linked article

  3. Below are some statistics for my website; the first shows Operating system visitors over cumulative time; the second is visitors Browsers over time. Note that the graphs are log-linear plots, and that they do not take into account users fiddling with their browsers agent settings so that they can, for instance, view MSIE only sites with Opera.





    Of interest is that the sale of Linux ready PCs by Dell in late May hasn't had any impact on the statistics, and nor has the release of Macintosh's Safari browser for windows in Mid June. In fact, I've only seen 2 visitors with a Safari/Windows combination visiting my site! It remains to be seen what impact Firefox 3, which has a massive uptake (7 million+ downloads) in June 2008 will have on these stats!

    Here is a graph showing non-cumulative OS visitors: i.e. only for that month:


    And here is one showing non-cumulative Browser visitors:



    The graphs show a roughly linear allegiance between total brands of browser and OS and time. For instance, whenever the total consumer usage of Firefox 0.x, 1 and 1.5 drops, Firefox 2 picks up by roughly the same amount. Perhaps nothing to be surprised about really? If you have used a particular browser and/or OS, and are impressed, why should you change? If you've used a bad browser, you might never be tempted to chance that flavour of browser again....?

    So, what could happen in the future? Well, I predict that Vista usage will increase at Christmas time, as people receive the OS as a present, and the fuss over the driver incompatibility wanes. Slashdot also ran a news report from Forbes saying that, with SCO's imminent collapse, enterprise companies may pick up Linux as a viable Windows alternative, with the worry of bogus licenses. I'm unconvinced by this though. We'll see.

    Another thing that may cause an uptake in Vista's numbers is the delivery of SP1, slated for the first quarter of 2008, thereby just missing the Christmas market. The sale of Linux ready desktops by Wal-Mart in November 2007, and by PC manufacturers, such as Dell, does not seem to have affected the take-up of this OS, sadly. However, with XP's dominance yet to be usurped, it is interesting to note that some PC providers (PC World?) are providing a downgrade to XP if need be (XP is due to be "obsoleted" by Microsoft towards the end of June 2008). Some reports indicate that many new PCs are being bought with a Vista license, but with XP installed, or are being purchased, and then Vista being wiped from the hard drive to be replaced by the older OS. How things will fare with the new version of Windows, due in January 2010, is a good subject for conjecture.

    Incidentally, the big spikes for Linux and Firefox 3 in the non-cumulative graphs (that is, graphs 3 and 4) for Month 17 is due to me inviting people to look at my access stats on the Slashdot website. So, I got visited by curious Linux/FF3 evangelists. The same thing happened in September for Linux when I placed an item on Slashdot regarding mistreatment in the workplace.

    Oh, and a welcome to the latest browser, Google's Chrome 0.x, which made its debut at 15.55 GMT on my web stats on September 3rd, 2008.

    stats are updated on, or about, the 25th of each month.

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