Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 20/08/2009: GNU/Linux Beats Vista 7, Shadowgrounds Survivor is Coming



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • Linux vs Windows 7
    And this is where Linux can make a big difference. There's nothing in Windows 7 that Linux can't do, and in most cases, do it better. Our machines are quicker and more efficient. Our desktops are more innovative and less static. Our apps are more powerful, cheaper and less partisan, and Linux security has never been better. But best of all, we have complete control over the future of Linux, and it's success or failure at the hands of Windows 7 is in our hands.


  • PS3 Slim - No more Linux? Ahh, but for how long...
    I'm saying it early - I foresee that the PS3 Slim will having Linux running on it within a few weeks of the launch.




  • Games

    • 42 Hot Free Linux Games (Part 2 of 3)
      To be eligible for inclusion in the list below, games again needed to satisfy the following requirements:

      Free to play (no download charge, no monthly charge)

      Does not require Wine to run. Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows software.

      Not in the early stages of development


    • Shadowgrounds Survivor from Igios is now GOLD !
      LGP Announced that Shadowgrounds Survivor from Igios is now GOLD. It has gone to replication and will be available in around 2-3 weeks. Survivor will be available both as a boxed product everywhere, and as a downloadable and rentable game from our download partners.


    • Quake Live at 1Ghz, 256Mb
      That’s Crux, by the way. I expected laggy performance and skipping graphics. But framerates are exceptionally good, although I didn’t find a way to show a number on screen. I’m not a huge first-person shooter fan, but it’s fun to try out.






  • K Desktop Environment

    • kmymoney 1.0, positioning
      Once again: cheers to the KMyMoney devs and I hope you all managed a small celebration to commemorate your milestone and the great gift you have delivered to the world! :)


    • on feature requests
      The source of the material was a thread on the kde-devel mailing list where feature additions for KDE 4 was brought up, and in particular features that were in KDE 3 that are not in KDE 4.

      [...]

      I want to see the good ideas float to the top and get the attention they deserve (e.g. implementations) and the good ideas that need to be prioritized for later still get the attention they deserve so nobody feels neglected.







  • Distributions

    • PCLinuxOS 2009.1 Minime Review
      What I liked most in this distribution:

      1. Inclusion of Update Notifier and Copy2Ram option. 2. Availability of OpenOffice 3.1, Firefox 3.5.2, Artha and many other useful packages in the repo. 3. Bloat-free attitude of Minime like its predecessors. 4. Adherence to KDE 3.5.10 + 2.6.26 kernel. 5. Stunning default wallpaper, bootsplash + ksplash.


    • UserOS Extreme 9.04 - coming to October 2009 PC User
      In less than two weeks, you’ll be able to give our latest operating system a go - UserOS Extreme 9.04. Based on the recent Ubuntu 9.04 release, we’ve built the new operating system from the ground up. You’ll be able to read in the October 2009 issue exactly what we did but we took a new approach to the operating system. It’s not based on an existing distro.




    • Red Hat Family







    • Debian Family











  • Devices/Embedded

    • 5 Reasons to Get Excited about Linux on the Netbook
      All that being said, you don't have to buy a netbook with Linux pre-installed to enjoy what this "alternative" OS has to offer. There are several versions out there which you can try today, no purchase required. And there are even more soon-to-launch distros which really get us excited.








Free Software/Open Source

  • Three Free Issues of BSD Magazine in .pdf Format
    Karolina at BSD Magazine wanted me to let you know that she has posted three free .pdf issues online. The three cover FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. Apparently BSD Magazine has survived a publishing scare and will continue for the foreseeable future. I may also have an article for FreeBSD out soon.


  • Quick and Dirty MySQL Performance Troubleshooting
    What are the first things you should look at after learning of a sudden change in MySQL server performance?


  • Community work in the framework project – Part 1
    Today I want to start a little overview about the current work of the framework project community members. Fortunately we have some volunteers from RedFlag 2000 who work on several projects


  • Durian is Coming: Blender's Third Open Movie Project
    Blender third open movie project, code-named “Durian” is ramping up to production, and time is running out for the pre-sale campaign if you want to get your spot in the credits. This time the project is focusing on an adolescent audience with an epic-fantasy setting and a female protagonist (my son aptly dubbed this the “Chicks in Chainmail” genre). The only art yet available from Durian itself is the series of banner ads (by concept artist, David Revoy), but an impressive creative team has already been announced.




Leftovers

  • MSI ditches Intel for AMD
    Russian tech site 3DNews review has reviewed the x610 X-Slim series laptop even before it's been officially announced by MSI. The reviewers discovered that the CPU change has put a big dent in performance and driven down battery life to two hours for the sake of a small cost saving.


  • Internet slowly wakes up to PayPal's quiet fee hike
    PayPal made some policy changes in June, but it's likely that you haven't heard much about them until very recently. That's because the company quietly slid in extra fees that will affect nearly all users but failed to be transparent about the changes. Now, the Internet is slowly discovering what happened, and no one is happy about it.


  • Town Hall Protests: Astroturf 2.0?
    Some Democrats have blamed the chaos on astroturf operations: fake grassroots groups funded by special interests. But are the forces whipping up the anti-health care frenzy really astroturf—or a new form of corporate-funded campaigning?




  • Censorship/Web Abuse

    • Censorship or Copyright Infringement? Flickr Takes Down "Obama as Joker" Photo
      Los Angeles residents recently began seeing a new sort of Obama poster plastered across their city. Instead of promoting "hope," these posters feature U.S. President Barack Obama wearing the Joker's clown makeup from the Batman movie "The Dark Knight." Even those outside of L.A. have likely seen this image somewhere as it soon took on a viral nature, appearing both online and in other cities across the country.








  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • BSA Softens Anti-Piracy Message
      The alliance, consisting of about 80 companies — including Apple, Microsoft and Adobe — is the counterpart to the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.


    • Striking a balance with copyright
      The various monopoly privileges misnamed ‘intellectual property’ (copyright and patent) are relatively recent creations, historically. Both of them derive form something called the ‘Statute of Anne‘. More directly, the copyright and patent laws in the United States derive from a clause in the Constitution which explicitly stipulates that they should only last for a ‘limited time’, and are explicitly required to promote “science and the useful arts”. (Article 1, Section 8.)


    • On Plagiarism, Scholarship, and Community Knowledge
      “During the course of this long volume I have undoubtedly plagiarized from many sources–to use the ugly term that did not bother Shakespeare’s age. I doubt whether any criticism or cultural history has ever been written without such plagiary, which inevitably results from assimilating the contributions of your countless fellow-workers, past and present. The true function of scholarship as a society is not to stake out claims on which others must not trespass, but to provide a community of knowledge in which others may share.” -F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance 1941.










Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day



Jin Sato, father of humanoid robots 01 (2005)



Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Microsoft Windows Fell to All-Time Lows in Egypt This Summer, Vista 11 Adoption Decreases While GNU/Linux Increases
Vista 11 is going down rather than up
12 Hours Ago The Register MS Published a Fake (Paid-for) Article, But This One for a Change Did Not Promote a Ponzi Scheme
There are also Free software alternatives, but they don't pay The Register MS for "synthetic" so-called 'journalism'
 
Gemini Links 27/08/2025: Katrina Memories and Google Versus Software Freedom
Links for the day
Links 27/08/2025: Police Against Media Freedom in the UK, Energy-Hungry Countries Targeted by China
Links for the day
Links 27/08/2025: Microsoft Demoralises Staff With Slop Demands, Leaving Mastodon Explained
Links for the day
More People Need to Call Out and Put a Stop to Serial Sloppers
Unless slopfarms are stopped, people will read and share Microsoft propaganda made by chatbots
Gemini Links 27/08/2025: Headphones and Tartarus
Links for the day
Morale at Microsoft is Terrible (Proprietary Plagiarism Machines Have No Future, LLM Slop is a Bubble)
The slop sceptics/critics are going to have lots of "told you so" moments
GNOME "governance issues, staff reduction, etc." amidst Albanian whistleblowing and women trafficking
Notice the connection to Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and GNOME
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, August 26, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, August 26, 2025
Richard Stallman (RMS) Was Right About "Sideloading" in 1996
We now have computers that treat booting GNU/Linux like an act of "Sideloading"
Panama: Windows Down From 97% "Market Share" to Less Than 30%
In 2009, Windows was measured at 97.24% (compared to 62.32% right now or less than 30% if one also counts Android)
The UEFI 9/11 - Part I - Introduction to Impending Catastrophe (Microsoft Preventing People From Booting Non-Windows Systems)
eight-part series
Why Techrights is Slow Today (Bot Floods)
We don't know if those bots are connected to LLMs (we have not checked), but that is a possibility
Slopwatch: DDoS Slop, LinuxBSDos.com Spam, and Slopfarms in Google News, Including webpronews.com
Among the news we also found fakes, albeit not so much today
Links 26/08/2025: "Ballooning Debt" in France and "Transnational Repression in the UK"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/08/2025: Listening to Alcest and Google Doing Evil (Users Installing Software is "Sideloading" and Prohibited)
Links for the day
Links 26/08/2025: DNS Tampering and TikTok Layoffs
Links for the day
Microsoft's Windows "Market Share" Overestimated
Microsoft's income sources are shrinking
We Shall See...
My wife and I are hardly the first victims of Brett Wilson LLP
This New Determination on a Case Echoes the Modus Operandi of Microsoft's Serial Strangler vs Techrights (Its Online Decision/Judgment Says Truth and Public Interest Defend the Publisher)
Noel Anthony Clarke hopefully has enough money left to pay his victims, which include the publishers
Going Offline
There was life before the Net
The Register MS Has Apparently Shut Down Its Office
It is basically a fake address on the face of it
There Are Also Expectations of IBM Layoffs Very Soon With "Narrative Control."
Some of them mention Red Hat and how IBM failed to achieve anything substantial with that acquisition
After at Least Two Rounds of Mass Layoffs in August Microsoft Said to Have "September Layoff Confirmed - Performance Based"
Those "M5 level meetings" sound plausible
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, August 25, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, August 25, 2025
Slopwatch: Slopfarms All Over Google News and Real News Sites Pushed Out of Visibility
Google News is dying (as a tool of value)
Gemini Links 25/08/2025: Numeric-only VM and Alhena 5.3.0
Links for the day
Links 25/08/2025: ‘Panama Playlists’ and Live Nation/Ticketmaster Suit Aims at Class Action
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/08/2025: Empathy Towards Autistic People and Old Gadgets
Links for the day
Links 25/08/2025: Datacentres Versus Water Supplies and "The IPv6 Divide"
Links for the day
Links 25/08/2025: Data Breaches, Politics, and Financial Strain
Links for the day
GNU/Linux Distros Ought to Replace Firefox (and Firefox ESR) With Something Like LibreWolf
Perhaps it's come to replace Firefox
Father of Julian Assange Said the US Government Was Trying to Bankrupt WikiLeaks, Now the Assange Family Promotes Fake Currencies
Using the name for bad purposes?
Bailing Out GAFAM, Giving Taxpayers' Money to Failing Companies, and Trying to Outlaw Lawsuits Against Them
What would the late Lincoln have said?
Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) Inc. Lost 2 Million Dollars Last Year and Its Chief Took a Salary Increase of Almost $6,000
Another year or two like this... and the SFC will be bankrupt [...] Hallmark of mismanagement
The "New Techrights" Turns Two Very Soon
Accomplishing something each year is what's important, not merely "finishing" another year
Gulf Nations Leave Microsoft Behind
How much lower will Microsoft stoop in an effort to raise money from oil-rich lenders?
How to Combat IRC Trolls (in Our Experience)
Today I want to share my experience (or knowledge) of how to deal with IRC trolls
The Register MS Needs to Stop Participating in the "Hey Hi" (AI) Hype, But It Gets Paid to Participate in This Hype
the publisher (The Register MS) wants to have it both ways
Gemini Links 24/08/2025: Living With Your Parents, Zürich Zoo, and Macondo
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 24, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, August 24, 2025