Microsoft has had an easy ride for the last eight years. They’ve not needed to innovate, update, or improve anything. They’ve sat back and enjoyed almost no competition. At least no real competition until recently.

Last April Microsoft lost a huge chunk of profits. Depending on who you we’re listening to, we’re talking anywhere from 16% to 33%. So what happened? They’ve not had to lift a finger for eight years, and now they had angry shareholders barking about in a wild manner.

In the early 90s a few very important things happened. Home computers started to get cheap. Not cheap like they are today, but affordable enough for the average home. Windows 3.1 came into the picture and easily killed Geoworks. (Don’t remember Geoworks? Damn I feel old now…) But the biggest boost for modern computing was the internet was now in peoples homes like never before. Powerhouses like AOL were making the internet a very friendly place.

Quietly in Finland a Linus Torvalds was building a free kernel for the GNU system built by American hacker Richard Stallman. These two unknowingly would together build the largest and most used free operating system in the world. But this was 1991 and no one was really using it. It was just for hobbyist and hackers.

In 2001 Microsoft released Windows XP. It proved to be a hit for Microsoft. The following years after XPs launch just got better and better. The office world had the perfect tool with Windows and Office, Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

However in 2006 Microsoft released Vista to the thundering sound of Killing off XP. This angered the masses. XP was slowly meld into the Desktop OS of choice and Vista was the shiny slow behemoth trying to shove it way into our hearts. Personally I believe this was the last straw. The peoples trust had been trampled for the last time.

As we approach the launch of Windows 7, Microsoft is just now starting to realize that the competition is more than just hobbyist and hackers. Linux is approaching the billion dollar industry. Apple has taken a huge bite out of some of Microsoft’s most profitable markets. And the beloved Office? It’s fallen prey to the power of MediaWiki.

The bottom line is, if Microsoft wants to remain top dog, they should be trying out cool Apple, out stable Linux, and do the one thing they used to do oh so long ago: Innovate.

Picture by Manoj Vasanth

Normally I don’t talk about finances with the general audience but I’ve begun panicing a bit. I’ve been running arthursucks.com for about 5 years or so. (Not sure how long, but it’s been a while!) I’ve been so tight on money I’m not sure if I can keep the doors open on this site. I’m not so worried about my site going dark for a while as I am worried about cyber-squatters and losing all my posts and work.

I used to have theotherwhitenoise and thenerdy dot com names, but now they’re squatted for about $75 a piece. I’ll be damned if I let this site fall into the same fate.

This site is almost entirely donation run. Everything from the comic to the music is free for anyone. I admit I should have tried harder in the past to get the name out there, but I’m a lousy business man. As you can see why it was easy for me to get into the situation at hand.

If you got the time and the money, a small donation would be gladly excepted.

Thanks!

So for all who do not already know, yesterday was Spetember 12th 2009.  It was also the Glenn Beck sponsored march on Washington.  Thousands of angry and confused white people marched on Pennsylvania Blvd to protest President Obama for letting poor people not get sick and die of the common cold.  Stupid poor people.

The pictures are amazing.  So many super-patriots out for the first time away from the soothing glow of Glen Beck’s flickering television image, knowing little about anything, but so proud… and old.

At least there were few smart people…

"If you can see this... You must be watching Fox News!"

I’ve been a huge fan of Ardour.  I talk about this program constantly.  I was overjoyed when I read about the LinuxDSP plugin kit.  The kit is several plugins designed for the JACK Audio Connection Kit and programs such as Ardour that can patch into Jack.

The Stereo Reverb Plugin – My favorite so far.

The plugins don’t work like most of the audio plugins in Linux.  The standard for the longest time has been the LADSPA plugins.  There is some amazing work done with LADSPA in the last few years.  Even though these new plugins were not Open Source, they were free and support 64-bit.  So I grab a few and hooked them up to jack and gave them a try.

Most of these plugins look like they are geared for guitar players, but they can be used for other things as well.  I hooked up my guitar to my sound card and turned on JACK.  After launching the plugin (It’s actually an independent application that connects with JACK) I connected it and my guitar sounded like it was hooked to a tube amplifier.  It was a subtle but nice sound.  I popped open Audacity and recorded a riff.

Download the raw PCM file here.

As you can see (and hear) it’s quite a quality effect.  I messed around with a few more of the plugins and they all are along the same quality.  When I get a chance to record again, I might do a simple track using these effects.  I found a good guide to connecting the DSP to Ardour, it might make life easier.

The official page mentions why they resisted the classic LADSPA route for the plugins:

“There are plans to support the LADSPA standard – which allows plugin software to function as part of a host application, similar to the VST standard on windows PCs. However this does not permit the same degree of flexibility when providing a graphical interface, and interprocess routing such as is available using jack is not as straight forward – or even possible in some cases.”

I guess at the end of the day, having both LADSPA and Independent version of the plugins would be the most optimal.  I’m glad to see more and more companies and developers are building musical and art applications and tools for Linux.  For the longest time Linux has been treated like the last option for people in the Arts.  It’s definitely not just for servers.

Oh yeah, ten points for the first to name the song that I butchered that riff from.