Just Uber

Recently I’ve been involving myself with the task of marketing Ubuntu, which lead me to wonder why it is that Ubuntu isn’t marketed very well in the first place.

To understand the question I guess it’d be pertinent to look an operating system oriented company which markets itself quite well. Lets not beat about the bush, lets choose Microsoft.

Here we have an company who have decided that in their latest operating system (Vista) that they are going to police what you do with the digital content that you play on your computer. A company who have created an OS which makes hardware you bought a couple of years ago useless, yet here is a company which is still managing to sell retail copies of Vista in shops. Why?

In addition to the obvious (current market saturation), Microsoft is pretty good at marketing itself and its products. The obvious pre-requisite for good marketing is good marketing people, who are in turn motivated by…. you guessed it ….money!

I think that’s a big problem with marketing Ubuntu. The grassroots advocates of Ubuntu are often techies. They’re honest, down to earth, helpful techies. What we need is double glazing salesmen.

Imagine the scene. You walk into a large marketing and PR company with a large wad of money and announce “I have unlimited capital to spend on this project, I want you to market some software for me”.

“Of course sir” replies the marketer, “and how much may I ask does this software cost”

“This software,” you retort “is free, and not only is it free, but it’s generally more secure, more stable and more responsive than the other types of software it competes against.”

If the marketer hasn’t passed out through sheer pleasure yet, you can bet your bottom dollar that he’s rubbing his hands in glee in the anticipation of an easy and profitable project.

That, to those who explain that we should market our flaws as well as our strengths is my reason for disagreeing. You’re entitled to disagree with me as is your option, but please take a look at the people who win in marketing.

Every product has its flaws - what is important is that you provide a good support network to help people through them if they come across them.

This is one double glazing salesman reporting for duty

(cue dodgy target ads for double glazing below this post….)

I’ve got a really noisy laptop with a really noisy CPU fan. It gets right on my nerves!

After doing a bit of reading I found that CPU frequency scaling is quite easy to implement in Ubuntu. I’m using a Pentium 4 Mobile CPU, but I believe you should get the same results with the Celeron Mobile chip.

Insert the p4_clockmod module:

sudo modprobe p4_clockmod

This shouldn’t return any output.

Add the line

p4_clockmod

to /etc/modules to ensure the CPU clock scaling module starts with the system.

Adding the CPU frequency scaling monitor applet to the panel (right click ‘add to panel’) will show the CPU frequency now. Reboot your laptop if it doesn’t seem to be working immediately.

Finally, if you (like I did) get miffed off with the laptop ‘lagging’ when needing a quick boost of power, you can manually set the frequency you want it to run at. Sometimes 250Mhz just isn’t enough!

sudo cpufreq-selector -f 1000000

Would set the CPU frequency to 1GHz - Easy eh?

Common sense at last - Gordon Brown has called for e-petitions to be debated in parliament.

The current system seems a bit of a farce (OK a lot of a farce) as any responses tend to pay lip service to the concept and never actually address the petitioners issues.

With the farcical event of 1.7 million signatures against road pricing and the scheme still going ahead, it certainly looks like the e-petitions system needs sorting.

If you agree, someone has already created an e-petition suggesting that e-petitions are debated in parliament once they reach a certain number of signatories.

You never know, someone might just take notice!