The Aspire One sells for P18,800 for the Linux version, making it the most attractively-priced netbook in the market today. For that price, you get an Intel Atom N270 processor, an 8.9-inch LCD screen, 1 gigabyte (GB) of memory, an 8GB flash drive for storage, built in Wi-Fi and Ethernet and a built-in Web cam.
The Aspire One comes with a good selection of free software, starting with the operating system, Linpus Lite, a version of Linux based on Fedora. Remarkably, the Aspire One boots up and is ready to use in less than 30 seconds.
If you are a parent or educator, do look into what open source software has to offer you, and do so without fear that your child will have difficulties transitioning from Microsoft Windows to a Linux environment.
So what is this thing good for? Well, just about anything. If you want to build a specialized solid state mission critical appliance that runs a custom PHP/MySQL application, or want to develop VPN gateways and Asterisk VOIP routers, or just like to hack around with a low-power Linux machine under your desk at work, this is the geek’s equivalent of a Linux Heathkit. Plat’Home has also recently started a contest where you can win a Microserver if you can come up with some great application that beats the living hell out of it.
Still, what we’re seeing today is an evolutionary step beyond the earlier vision. The cloud centers, analysts note, rely on a technological bedrock of industry-standard server computers and open-source software like Linux, linked together in massive computing clusters.
“DRM is nearly always the result of a conspiracy of companies to restrict the technology available to the public. Such conspiracy should be a crime, and the executives responsible for it should be sentenced to prison.”
Is Free Software dependent on the Internet? I have fantasized a (hopefully) comical situation that describes where I believe Free Software would be today if the Internet had never been invented.
Despite the considerable advances that the free software has made in the last years in its €«market share€» in different fields in informatics, only in a few of this fields free software has the supremacy. One of these is the field of web servers.
In reading through Microsoft's annual report, I am struck by how far the company has come in appreciating the threat that open source brings to Redmond.
But Microsoft's unusual behavior over the last few weeks has taken a different form: for the first time, perhaps since the Netscape threat arose in the early 1990s, Microsoft is acting scared.
The report shows that Microsoft is aware of its own important balancing act as the company strives to maintain its relevance and dominance in the services era.
11 percent have already made the switch to Mac OS X or Linux. Sorry Microsoft, the outlook isn’t getting any better.