Digital photo frames were one of the best-selling consumer electronics products this holiday season, but some of them carried a nasty surprise - malicious software code that tried to hop onto personal computers when the frames were plugged in.
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-- Consider finding a friend with a Linux machine to examine your photo frame before you plug it in to your PC.
Shuttleworth is seeing the early part of 2009 as a critical period for Linux on the desktop. "It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to shine, and we want to make sure that the very best thinking across the whole open source ecosystem is reflected in Ubuntu, because many people will judge free software as a whole by what we do," he said.
Six-year-old BlueStar Energy Services doesn't have the kind of systems-baggage that saddles many older organizations. Still, the company found itself hindered by the rigidity of its core systems, which constrained its efforts to expand its customer base and offer new services.
Those barriers to growth led the company to embark on a bold effort to replace the bulk of its IT infrastructure -- including voice, e-mail and financial systems -- with open-source software. The initiative has been so successful that CEO Guy Morgan attributes much of the company's recent growth to it.
BlueStar's open-source push has been driven by Tom Keen, the company's chief technology officer since June 2006. While evaluating BlueStar's IT architecture and business systems as a consultant, Keen had seen an opportunity for open-source systems to provide the company's operations with greater flexibility and scalability while strengthening its ability to expand into new markets.
In a time when free formats are finally gaining some terrain over their counterparts, there was a niche in Ogg that had not been properly tapped yet: captioning.
I realize that a free/libre/open source internet is still possible, but it will require us to stop supporting corporate websites such as myspace.
This mirrors use of Open Source software versus proprietary software and, in fact, that's no accident. Cloud computing infrastructures are built, by and large, from Open Source components. After all, the cloud providers don't want to make large investments upfront without knowing the financial outcomes, either. One might say that cloud computing is a proxy for end user Open Source adoption, since it acts as a middleman to ‘civilize’ Open Source for end users.
In November, the Spanish government launched a media campaign which heavily criticized file-sharers. Now, Spain’s Association of Internet Users has issued a complaint, claiming the content “recklessly offers information that lacks all legal basis, with the exclusive aim of re-educating public opinion.” Sounds familiar.
This would help not only in the current case, but generally when the UK government is grappling with the intersection of policy with technology. Sadly, previous decisions involving computers, the Internet and related areas have frequently ignored salient facts that have subsequently vitiated the proposed schemes.
In summary, please don't even think about implementing clumsy classification schemes until more general structures are in place to help arrive, collaboratively, at ones that will work better.
