Tag: tech news

I find it interesting to read about where Linux is showing up nowdays and think its interesting how many consumer electronics gadgets are running Linux without their users even knowing about it. If you compare to how Microsoft likes to plaster labels on everything that is “Windows XP|Vista|7 ready”, many consumer electronics are running Linux without users knowing.

I’m sure this list is only scratching the surface, but here’s a few examples of devices running Linux:

• Tivo – we’ve had our Tivo series 1 box for something like 8 years now – it’s running constantly everyday and I can’t think of any problems we’ve ever had with it, other than hardware related when the cooling fan broke and it turned off because it overheated. Easily fixed. Other than that it’s running 24/7. Can’t imagine anything running Windows being as stable as that, and not even coming anywhere close.
• Most Sony TVs since about 2003 (see here)
• Palm Pre & Pixi
• Google Android based phones
• Many routers and WiFi hubs (eg Linksys)
• Amazon Kindle

Google is holding a press conference at 10am PST today, expecting to announce details of the availability of the Nexus One Android phone which they’re planning on selling direct to customers. Details here.

The worst thing when you’re trying to help someone remotely with a sick Windows PC is to try and talk them through writing down the interesting/useful parts from Blue Screen of Death. Luckily, by default, Windows will write out a dumpfile to c:windows by default (you can enable/disable this from Startup and Recovery settings in My Computer / Properties). To read these files, install the Windows Debug Tools from here (link), and then from the command line use ‘dumpchk’ to read the dump file. The useful part of info you can grab from the output is the one line that says something like ‘Probably caused by [driver name here]’ – once you’ve got this a quick Google will tell you what it’s a driver for, and then hopefully thats enough to tell you what hardware/driver is causing the issues (assuming it’s a hardware/driver issue).

Internet Explorer is losing market share, not to any one particular other browser, but more interestingly, almost every other browser is gaining while IE is losing. Firefox, Safari and Chrome are all gaining market share while IE is losing.