Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 27/12/2009: RSSOwl 2 Reviewed, Glimpse at Fedora Omega 12



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • Cloud over the IT world in 2010? – Survey results & what next for Windows?
    So what of Windows? Could its closed source nature be eventually the death of it? Quite possibly, one only has to look at the wealth of FOSS projects that are providing alternative solutions to many of Microsoft products. Even Microsoft themselves are alleged to use GPL code (and allegedly violate it albeit by a third party)

    Remember Mr Ballmer’s cancer comment in regards to Linux?
    Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches
    But then should we really pay any attention to him? he was alleged afterall to also say that Google was a house of cards and iPhone had no chance of getting a significant market share. I bring this up since GoogleOS is built on Linux so its rather relevant that the first “mainstream” steps of this concept are being taken by that which Mr Ballmer seems to have a low opinion of. Talking of cancer and IP, I wonder if he would like to retract that since Microsoft China are alleged to have taken code from another companies product and attempted to use it as their own. For more information on this, read the article here.


  • It's the eye of the beholder.
    I like Linux. I like it a lot and I think it is the best thing since sliced bread. Better even, I don't make any money off of sliced bread, just a bigger belly. I know that many of you out there like windows. You like it a lot as well and probably make money off of it too.

    When we like something we tend to gloss over the flaws. There is another saying that love is blind. That is also very true. Not just in looks but in every aspect. On the other side of the coin. When we dislike something we tend to exaggerate the flaws. This means that when somebody is gushing about Linux or ranting about windows then perhaps we should take off our rose shades and try to see things from their point of view.


  • 15 game-changing Linux moments of the decade
    May 2002: OpenOffice.org 1.0

    Few would consider using Linux if there wasn't the semblance of Microsoft Office compatibility. Sun Microsystems bought, renamed and released its own broadly compatible office suite for free, in what it must have hoped would be a flanking attack on Microsoft's dominance. A tactic it revisited with the re-licence of Java in 2007.


  • Microsoft fears Windows XP? – or Ylmf.OS?
    Ylmf OS appears to the casual user as XP. Currently the Ubuntu based distro has no English translation. What does this mean for Microsoft? Well if it becomes the “protest choice” of China then quite alot, its got a 10 million strong user base to attract. You can visit the website of this distro here and I would ask if anyone knows of either a translation for the distro itself and/or the homepage, please let me know!




  • Server

    • Habl to introduce revolutionary server solution in 2010
      Habl Consultancy, an open source and linux solutions provider headquartered in Dubai Silicon Oasis, promises to announce a revolutionary network server solution in January 2010. The exact details of the server solution are currently under wraps, however it will help companies save an enormous amount of money.








  • Applications







  • Distributions

    • Sabayon 5.1 : Another good KDE distribution
      Sabayon 5.1 is really another good as well as a newbie friendly distribution for average computer users. It may not be as easy as Ubuntu or OpenSUSE but a person with 6-9 months of knowledge in Linux can easily manage Sabayon.


    • BrowserLinux: a Linux distro with a browser, and nothing much else
      Okay, if you’re looking to install this on your main computer, I really wouldn’t advise doing that. Having a lightweight operating system is well and good, but to run a system as stripped-down as this, you’re going to run into something that’ll need an application not available for your OS. Better stick with a bootable flash drive if I were you.


    • Red Hat Family





    • Debian Family

      • Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 1 review
        Ubuntu 10.04’s Alpha has been released. We decided to install it on one of our netbooks to see what is new in it. Canonical claims that many new things will surface with the release Ubuntu 10.04 and some of them have been implemented in the alpha release.

        [...]

        Right now, there is not even a basic paint alternative. gpaint which although looks a lot like MS paint, but cannot even crop a picture. So, if GIMP is removed, I don’t think there is a worthy MSpaint alternative in Linux

        Office

        * Dictionary * Evolution mail and calender * OpenOffice Presentaion * OpenOffice Spreadsheet * OpenOffice Word Processor

        Sound and Video

        * Brasero Disc Burner * Movie Player * Rhythmbox Music Player * Sound Recorder


      • Karmic Koala: What's new in Ubuntu
        One important feature is the new software centre, Kissling says. A bit of background: modern Linux distributions all possess a so-called package manager. This is a utility to help users install new software not included with Linux itself. Instead of searching through the web for a specific program, the package manager handles the heavy lifting.


      • Sabily 9.10 Is Based on Karmic Koala
        Complete with customized artwork and a big collection of Muslim-specific software, Sabily (formerly Ubuntu Muslim Edition) is a robust operating system for Muslims all over the world, be they Arabic speakers or not.












  • Devices/Embedded

    • Sansa Fuze, Works great with Ubuntu and Rythmbox
      All in all another pleasant experience with Sansa products under Linux. I have an older e250 myself and had another even before that, all of which worked well with Ubuntu. For a quality music/video player for use with Ubuntu I can highly recommend the products from Sansa. Most can be purchased for less then $75 and refurbished ones like my last two for well under $50.


    • Cherrypal Offers Laptop for Under $100
      Cherrypal on Tuesday announced a no-frills laptop called Cherrypal Africa, which includes hardware usually found in smartphones. It can run the Linux or Windows CE operating systems, which are also found on cell phones.

      Priced at $99, the laptop is targeted at those looking for an inexpensive PC to surf the Internet, said Max Seybold, founder of Cherrypal. It is a "no-thrills" laptop that could find an audience in developing countries and low-income groups in the Western world, he said








Free Software/Open Source

  • Samba Team Blog #3
    The Samba 4 code has been worked on for over five years, and the Active Directory code is reaching a state where it's being run in production at several test sites.

    When the Samba Team met at the CIFS conference this year, we had a meeting to put together a plan for shipping a production Samba 4 code-base. Here's how we think it might work.


  • Asian ‘campers’ troop to Cavite, reinforce open-source movement
    The conference was the third such event in the region, organized by the International Open Source Network (IOSN) and InWEnt-Capacity Building International of Germany.

    Earlier camps took place in Bangalore, India in 2005 and Sukabumi, Indonesia in 2007. It is based on the source camp template of the Tactical Technology Collective, an NGO that consults for other NGOs on technology.


  • Google Open Source Projects You Didn’t Know About
    I just came across some Open source projects by Google, which were really unknown to me.




  • Mozilla

    • Getting Mozilla's Lightning/Iceowl to work in Thunderbird/Icedove
      We all know that due to the copyright of the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation/whatever-it-is, that the Debian project decided awhile ago to drop the copyrighted logos and names from the very popular Mozilla products, hence:

      Firefox = Iceweasel Thunderbird = Icedove Seamonkey = Iceape

      And it turns out the Mozilla standalone calendar application Sunbird as well as the Lightning version of that app that works inside of Thunderbird/Icedove has its own Debian-dubbed name:

      Iceowl.


    • Free email programme Thunderbird available in new version
      The email programme Thunderbird is available in a new, highly revised version, its developer Mozilla Messaging has announced. Thunderbird 3.0, an open-source email client, includes more than 2,000 revisions and improvements, according to the California-based company which is also behind the Firefox browser.








  • Openness







Leftovers

  • Upper Mismanagement
    It’s not obvious that you would. Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that’s the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background.




  • Finance

    • Responding to Goldman Sachs
      The New York Times published a Christmas Eve expose of Goldman Sachs's so-called "Abacus" synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). They were created with credit derivatives instead of cash securities. Goldman used credit derivatives to create short bets that gain in value when CDOs lose value. Goldman did this for both protection and profit and marketed the idea to hedge funds.


    • Master of risk who did God's work for Goldman Sachs but won it little love
      Under other circumstances, this would have been a year to savour in the long, rapid ascent of Lloyd Blankfein. Goldman Sachs, the investment bank he has led for three years, not only navigated the 2008 global financial crisis better than others on Wall Street but is set to make record profits, and pay up to $23bn (€16bn, €£14bn) in bonuses to its 31,700 staff.


    • Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won
      “The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”


    • Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein Named Financial Times Person Of The Year
      But while the FT may agree that Blankfein is doing "God's work," others view the bank as indicative of exactly what is wrong with Wall Street. Indeed, Blankfein himself apologized last month for Goldman Sachs' role in the financial crisis. And Goldman Sachs's trading practices are currently under investigation by the federal government.

      In response to the FT's decision to honor Blankfein, noted bank analyst Christopher Whalen has canceled his subscription to the paper. "Mr. Blankfein and his colleagues at Goldman Sachs, in my view, have done more to damage the reputations of global financial professionals than any other organization in 2009, yet you applaud them," he wrote in a letter to the paper.






  • Censorship/Civil Rights

    • Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo sentenced to 11 years in jail
      One of China's most prominent human rights activists was condemned today to 11 years in prison, prompting a furious backlash from domestic bloggers and international civil society groups.

      Liu Xiaobo, the founder of the Charter 08 campaign for constitutional reform, was given the unusually harsh jail term on Christmas Day in an apparent attempt to minimise international attention.


    • (en) Venezuela, Anarchist journal El Libertario #57 - To defend the right of social protest!
      From Venezuela, a group of social organizations and human rights, students and academic groups as well as different individuals, launch this call for a campaign to defend the right to protest, which today is being systematically violated by the government of Hugo Chávez.










Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day



Joerg Heilig, Sun Microsystems Senior Engineering Director talks about OpenOffice.org 12 (2004)

[an error occurred while processing this directive]



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

Recent Techrights' Posts

An Illusion and Cult Worship of Magnitude (Ubiquity as "Victory")
GNU has been around for over 40 years and it'll likely continue to exist for another 40 (in some form)
Wall Street Does Not Care About Microsoft's Impending (August) Layoffs, It Believes Lies From Microsoft, Whose Debt Grows Rapidly
If Microsoft is doing so well and swimming in money, why so many cuts (about 29,000 layoffs so far this year)?
Riot for peace & Love: Catholic Influencers and Digital Missionaries welcome Jubilee of Youth
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
 
Links 31/07/2025: Spotify Collapses and Spotify Now Forcing Some Users to Undergo Face-Scanning
Links for the day
A Lot of Supposedly "Successful" Businesses Are Just Debt-Racking Vessels Without Any Prospects of Financial Sustainability
The probability of bankruptcy of any business is more than 0%
theregister.com: The Voice of Microsoft US?
It basically sold out
Yes, You Can Love and Adore Things Whilst Also Criticising Them
Is society being divided and groomed/primed to be resistant to constructive criticism?
Links 31/07/2025: War in Ukraine, Security News, and Cyberattacks Against Journalists on the Rise
Links for the day
Gemini Links 31/07/2025: Fake Money and Gemini Diaries
Links for the day
Google: From Pointing to Relevant Sites to Pointing to Social Control Media to Actually Parroting Social Control Media as "Facts"
Google has become a misinformation company
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 30, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, July 30, 2025
How to Report Apple Layoffs Without Saying the "L" Word
don't look for the "L" word
Wayland Considered Harmful (to GNU/Linux Adoption)
it's not limited to games
My Experience With Judges Has been Positive, But We Must Still Pursue SLAPP Reform in the United Kingdom
We believe it'll be a "feather in the cap" if we can help change laws in the UK to better protect investigative reporters
Slopwatch Makes the Web Better
Remember what happened to BetaNews?
Slopwatch: Google News is Pumping in Lots of Web Traffic Into Fake Sites That Say "Linux"
somewhere between 30% and 40% of today's "news" about "Linux", as seen by Google News, is LLM slop
Links 30/07/2025: Climate Calamities Highlighted, Kyrgyzstan Crackdown on Expression/Freedoms
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/07/2025: Watson’s List of Limits, Lysenko 2000
Links for the day
Some People See What Others See... But Only 40 Years Later
When people deviate from "the norm" they typically get ridiculed and dismissed as "crazy"
Links 30/07/2025: Tea Class Action and Google Killing the Web With Slop
Links for the day
Last Month Our IRC Community Turned 17
Funnily enough we never missed a single day when it comes to logging
"The Unix Kernel"
Linux was inspired by MINIX
The Register Relays Microsoft Marketing, Dubs That Marketing "Research"
Hours ago they did a "Microsoft sez" piece
Dealing With Sociopaths, Liars, and Cranks
A dysfunctional society such as this would never develop
Not Owning Mobile Phones
It's not about resistance; it's common sense
Google 'Search' is Fast Becoming No Better Than Social Control Media Infested With Bots
Google emerged almost 30 years ago as a company looking to organise the Web and direct people towards informative pages. That Google is dead.
PCLinuxOS Had Functional Backups Before the House Fire, the Site Will be Restored in New Webhost
This is the direction we want for GNU/Linux, not some IBM sales strategy
Gemini Links 30/07/2025: Two Sides of Me and "Hooked on Cosmic Voyage"
Links for the day
Microsoft Will Continue Resorting to Crimes in Order to Keep GNU/Linux Usage Down
It is a real problem and we'll revisit it later this week
GAFAM 'Revolving Doors' at The Register and a "Bribe Price List"
"an analyst at Microsoft"
Microsoft Rapidly Shrinking (No, It's Not About Efficiency, It's About Unbearable Debt)
We'll soon see how much debt grew in the past quarter
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 29, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, July 29, 2025
Corruption is the Standard Operating Procedure at the European Patent Office (EPO)
The EPO is a dictatorship that stains Europe
Local Staff Committee Munich (LSCMN) at the European Patent Office (EPO) Requests an Urgent Meeting to Avoid Abolishing the Office
This is dictatorship led by the most corrupt
Slopwatch: Fake 'Linux' 'Articles' and Spamfarms/Slopfarms
at least 5 fake articles in one day
Gemini Links 29/07/2025: Wayland Unfit for Use and LLM Slop Faking One's Language Skills With Robot Communications
Links for the day
Before the OSI Was Bribed and Hijacked by Microsoft via GitHub and Compromised Management...
The OSI isn't even remotely "woke"
Nailing the "Hey Hi" (AI) Hype Bubble
So-called "hey hi" as they define it now is all about large companies or regimes remotely controlling the processes running on your machine and even your very own behaviour on your machine, which is in effect no longer your machine but some remotely controlled apparatus
The OSI Has Been Silent for Over 3 Weeks, It Has a Severe Trust Issue After Promoting Microsoft and Proprietary GitHub
OSI took a lot of money from Microsoft to become a Microsoft lobbyist
"Four decades; Four freedoms; For all users" Now as a T-shirt
That's shown along the sidebar
Bribery is OK If You Work for Microsoft (No Punishment Expected)
It's very troubling and a symptom of a broken society/system when particular laws or rules are applied and enforced against some people but not against others
Links 29/07/2025: Bad Climate and "Fair Software Licensing" Blasts Microsoft
Links for the day
Links 29/07/2025: Data Brokers Gone Wrong/Rogue and "Copyright Thicket"
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Linuxconfig.org, Linuxsecurity.com, Fagioli, The Register
Today's "Slopwatch" isn't the first article about LLM slop
Someone Should Remind Microsoft Lunduke That Microsoft Hires Many Sexual Criminals and Pedophiles as Well
Microsoft Lunduke on an "expedition" to find one or more perverts, then generalise to everyone in the "community"
Cash Machines (ATMs) Make Mistakes and They're Proprietary Software
Correcting mistakes is a colossal challenge
We Cover Topics Other Sites Are Too Afraid to Cover (Even When They Know the Facts)
It's not that they doubt the truth, they just realise there may be consequences for talking about it
They Try to Tell Us the Free Software Foundation Inc is Dying, But Its Revenue Doubled Since the Dot-Com Bubble Burst
Being in "Activism" is never easy; but it does positive things for society
Yes, Microsoft is the Problem
"I am no MS shill."
It's About the Cost of Workers, Not the Fictional Skills Shortage (That Does Not Exist, the Media Spreads False and Sometimes Self-Fulfilling Narratives)
This issue isn't limited to computing, some dub it "globalism"
Another Failed Use Case for Chatbots (LLM): Legal Advice and Analysis
They're just some self-discrediting toy that costs way too much to operate
Links 29/07/2025: More Pushbacks Against Slop and More Praises of Tom Lehrer
Links for the day
Gemini Links 29/07/2025: Purple Yarrow and Understanding Op Amps
Links for the day
This Monday WebProNews Absolutely Flooded the Web With Fake (LLM Slop) 'Articles' About "Linux", Google News Promoted Them as Legitimate
All of the following are fake articles attributed to pseudonyms or authors that don't exist; the images are also slop. Why does Google promote these?
Linuxiac is Not a Slopfarm, But at Least Some of Its Articles Are Machine-Generated Fakes
what we said about it was correct
Expect More Microsoft Layoffs
"Are more job cuts coming?"
Microsoft Behaving Like It's Running Out of Money to Pay Salaries
Does that seem like the behaviour expected from a company which claims it is "worth" trillions?
LWN Downtime Due to Linode, Not LLM Bots
"I’ve received an email letting me know that there is a potential for data loss."
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 28, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, July 28, 2025