I will be migrating future content on this blog to a new URL, http://randombits.workingagenda.com. I will also be changing the CMS from WordPress to Drupal 7.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes National Industry-Specific Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates.

The BLS estimated 24,580 persons were employed as “Computer and Information Research Scientists” in 41 states. The employment occupation code is 15-1111.

52 percent of all jobs were in 5 states: California, Virginia, Maryland, Texas and Massachusetts.

This is a BLS map of the location quotient[*] for occupation code 15-1111.

(*) The location quotient is the ratio of the area concentration of occupational employment to the national average concentration. A location quotient greater than one indicates the occupation has a higher share of employment than average, and a location quotient less than one indicates the occupation is less prevalent in the area than average.

In terms of market cap and revenue per employee, Apple and Google are in another class.

These results are not correlated with R&D spending. At 2.2 percent, Apple reports the second lowest percent of revenues invested in R&D for the group (only Dell is lower at 1.3 percent), but has the highest revenue and market cap per employee. Google, which ranks second on both metrics, invested 13.7 percent of revenues in R&D. Red Hat, the Linux company, has the highest rate of reinvesting in R&D, of 18.2 percent, and a market cap per employee of $1.97 million — which puts Red Hat 4th out of the ten companies in the comparison.

I have moved this post to the new URL for Random Bits. The current link for this blog entry is:
http://randombits.workingagenda.com/node/12

I use Ubuntu, and like some Adobe AIR applications, like the Adobe AIR implementation of Tweetdeck, so this is a disappointment.

This now from Adobe: “Beginning June 14 2011, Adobe AIR is no longer supported for desktop Linux distributions. . . . Lifetime AIR for Linux desktop downloads represent less than 0.5% of total AIR desktop downloads, which number over 450 million. Therefore, Adobe has decided to change the distribution model for Linux and direct these resources toward its mobile efforts. Adobe’s efforts are focused on supporting operating systems that are most important to its customers, and that demonstrate the greatest opportunity for future growth for our partners and developers.”

After experiencing a lot of frustration with my work computer freezing up, I bought a new Gateway FX6860, tested it home over the weekend (my evaluation here), and brought it to work today. But at the office, the new computer had exactly the same issues as the old one.

Was this related to some ISP issue? We were hacked at work? Did the computer get screwed up during the transport? The real problem was fairly simple, but overlooked. At work, my favorite logitech trackball that had a left click button that would go on the fritz, and make it seem as though the computer was freezing up.

Last Friday I purchased a Gateway FX6860 tower computer. It came with 8 gb of DDR3 ram (The maximum is 16 gb), a 1.5 tb drive of unknown make or speed, an n-wireless device, an AMD Radeon 6750 video card with 1 gb of video memory, and an Intel i-7 2600 CPU. It has been a while since I bought new computer for my own use, and I wanted something fast. I would have settled for a slower processor, but I liked the fact that his Gateway model has two front bays where you can slide in SATA hard drives. It also has two USB 3 ports in the back.

The computer came with Windows 7 home premium 64, but Gateway does not ship with physical media. (More on this below). I use it mostly to run Linux, and an installation of Ubuntu 11.04 was without a hitch — everything worked fine.

The machine seems quite fast, and at least for me, it makes a noticeable difference in doing various number crunching, graphing, photo editing and report formatting tasks. At first I didn’t think I would like the keyboard, which looked cheap when I unpacked the machine, but it’s actually very nice, and the specialty keys work very well with Ubuntu.

I am using a larger 24 inch dell 1920x monitor with the HDMI connection. I also hooked up a second 1400×900 19 inch monitor using the free DVI connector on the AMD Radeon card, and it worked right away, without editing any configuration files.

The more I use this machine, the more I like it. I even found the case well designed. The front loading slots to swap 2 hard drives make it possible to pull out a back up drive and store it in a secure area. There is an area on the top designed as sort of a shelf to leave stuff. It has a large number of USB slots front, back and top, audio connectors front and back, and I think it takes 7 different flash memory cards, of the type you probably use in a camera.

And, the computer is very quiet. Which is pleasant.

Windows 7 password issue

I planned to use Ubuntu, but wanted a dual boot machine, so I logged on in Windows to see how the machine worked. However, when I logged back on after loading some OS updates, I found that it did not recognize my password. I had no idea what happened, since I thought I was being careful, and I had to give it twice. And, I had not created the recovery disks yet, so I did not have copies of the OS or Windows drivers. I ended up installing Ubuntu 11.04, and when I went to the boot menu, it showed the Gateway recovery partition, and when I booted into that partition, from Ubuntu, it re-installed Windows 7, in the Window 7 partition on the dual boot machine. I then logged back into Windows, and created the 4 backup recovery DVDs.

Like others, I recently found myself struggling to use the LibreOffice program “base” to do database calculations, when it was running on a Linux OS (in my case, Ubuntu 11.04). The main issue was the fact that the problem took ridiculous amounts of time to do just about anything. The problem is not evident on a Mac, and apparently not on Windows either.

Apparently this is a JAVA issue. Specifically, you need to tell the Linux version of OpenOffice/LibreOffice to use an older run time version of Java, or it just will not work right.

I found a good solution to the problem in this forum.

Re: Super Slow Base
by compuwatch » Sat Jun 04, 2011 3:37 pm

Had similar problem in UBUNTU and solved it this way. The whole process takes about 2 Minutes (Very Easy)

Here’s how:

1. Download the java-sun-jre-1.6.21 from:

http://java.sun.com/products/archive/j2se/6u21/index.html

2. Move the file to your (Create Folder) $HOME/bin and make it executable

go to folder once it is there and make file executable.

$> chmod a+x jre-6u21-linux-i586.bin
$> ./jre-6u21-linux-i586.bin

4. After extracting the files, configure your LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org to use the older java runtime (Tools -> Options –> LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org –> Java). Add the path from where the extracted files currently located.

5. Restart your computer, then restart your LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org and verify if your database now runs smoothly.

6. Done.

I followed the instructions, and it now works as it should, very fast, on my Ubuntu 11.04 distribution. That said, why does 1.6.21 work, while later versions do not? And what if anything did Oracle have to do with breaking the OpenOffice/LibreOffice database code? After all, Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun, which controlled Java and OpenOffice development, in January of 2010. KEI, Richard Stallman and others opposed the merger on the grounds that Oracle would try to undermine the future development of MySQL. Since the merger was completed, there have been a variety of complaints about the way that Oracle has managed the various open source assets, leading to new efforts to fork or replace MySQL and to spin off or fork OpenOffice.Org. The fact that the Linux version of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice database program is broken because of problems with the newer versions of Java is fairly bizarre, since Oracle is first and foremost a database company, and during the period when the problem emerged, Oracle controlled both Java and OpenOffice.

Bill Gates is listed as an inventor of United States Patent, 7930197, issued April 19, 2011, for “Personal data mining.”

What did Bill Gates claim to have invented regarding data mining? According to the patent Abstract:

Personal data mining mechanisms and methods are employed to identify relevant information that otherwise would likely remain undiscovered. Users supply personal data that can be analyzed in conjunction with data associated with a plurality of other users to provide useful information that can improve business operations and/or quality of life. Personal data can be mined alone or in conjunction with third party data to identify correlations amongst the data and associated users. Applications or services can interact with such data and present it to users in a myriad of manners, for instance as notifications of opportunities.

The Assignee is Microsoft.

These are a few quotes from the patent:

In particular, a computing model/architecture that utilizes thin clients and robust computing resources that are maintained off-premise (e.g., third party) and are accessible over a WAN such as the Internet. In such a computing model, a collection of hardware and/or software resources, also known simply as the cloud, can be utilized to provide applications and/or services, store data, process data and maintain data security, inter alia. This relieves end users of being forced to perform various tasks, including installing several applications on multiple computers, maintaining security with respect to each computer, purchasing hardware for a server for increased storage and other laborious tasks.

And

The data repository(s) 114 is operable to store personal user data associated with a plurality of users. In one instance, such data can include data generated by a user, owned by a user or otherwise linked thereto. By way of example, this data can include but is not limited to personal management information (PIM data), pictures, videos, documents, e-mail, instant messages, addresses, calendar dates/scheduling information (e.g., birthdays, anniversaries, appointments . . . ), voice mail, phone logs, RSS feeds, subscriptions, bookmarks, mail lists, project management features, computing device data, tasks and location data. In one instance, such data can be supplied by individual users via one or more devices 120. Additionally or alternatively, user data can be provided by third parties such as purchase data, identity data, web interaction, etc.

This is one of many patents on Internet searches and marketing practices that list Bill Gates as a co-inventor.

It’s hard to understand what exactly constitutes an “invention” in this patent. The descriptions at least are incredibly general and involve obvious things many firms probably already do.

I was in shock when I first tried Ubuntu 11.04 in a Beta version, because it was so different, and because it seemed to have so many rough edges. The final version was improved enough, and I began to warm up enough to the new changes, that I have now upgraded two desktop and four laptop computer to 11.04. Everything seems to be working fine except for an older IBM X31 laptop that I decided was better off with an older (10.04) version of Ubuntu, mostly due to the increased demands on graphics by Unity in 11.04.

I found two blogs that helped understand better some of the advantages of Unity, and provided some insight into how to tweak it.

• April 29, 2011, Tweak Unity to better suit your needs. Don’t give up!
• Unity keyboard/mouse shortcuts, AskUbuntu.Com

I also recommend this review of Ubuntu 11.04:

• May 2011. Ryan Paul, Riding the Narwhal: Ars reviews Unity in Ubuntu 11.04, Ars Technica.

After using Unity for a while, and remembering some of useful keyboard shortcuts, such as super+w, to find the window I need, and remembering the first couple of letters of applications I want to start from the launcher, I began to see why Ubuntu is making the switch. It was a risky and gutsy move to make so many changes in 11.04, and while not all of them work that well just yet, I can see where things are going. I’m guessing Mark Shuttleworth thinks he can find a way to make Ubuntu a much more widely used operating system, and he’s willing to shake things up to move it in that direction. That said, at times I felt like I was looking at Microsoft’s Vista, something that was not ready for prime time.

One thing I don’t recommend is making too many changes in the default settings for Unity. I managed to make one user’s settings pretty much unusable by doing that, and now I’m more careful.

Like many people, I have reduced the size of the icons in the side panel. At some point, I recommend installing the Compiz setting manager:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

A year ago or so Ubuntu was saying it wanted to speed up the boot time. This seems to have slipped a bit. For a Dell Netbook with an Intel Celeron processor running at 1.3 Ghz, and a standard hard drive, the boot time, including the dual boot and login menus, was about 1 minute 10 seconds.

Update June 28, 2011. Keeping in mind that I use Ubuntu on 4 different computers, the more I have used 11.04, the more crashes, freezes and problems I have had, really unlike other Ubuntu upgrades, which were pretty solid. This may be a consequences of Ubuntu’s aggressive changes for this release, or suggest that Ubuntu needs to re-think its six month release schedule.

Update August 7, 2011. I recently switched a number of our older machines to Lubuntu, a very fast light weight version of Linux that uses the Ubuntu repositories. I wrote about this here. Lubuntu is designed for older machines, and works even with .5 gigs of RAM and older video cards, but it has an attractive and pretty appealing UI too, and makes every computer run quite a bit faster than a standard Windows or Ubuntu installation.