The Year We Turn 18
Tux Machines turns 20 this summer...
THE winter holidays are over (northern hemisphere assumed here) for more and more people. It's virtually over already as some go back "to the office" (assuming that do not work from home). For us, it has been joyful and calm. The sites' uptime is nearly 100% (static sites are like that), so we've slept well and were stress-free. This site also serves pages about 10 times faster than before the upgrade:
"Look, ma. No bloat!"
Lots of advantages to it.
How about you? How was the time off? Good? Mozilla (Google), Apple and Microsoft aren't doing too well, but Mitchell Baker's bank account grows at a pace of 7 million dollars a year, not counting interest on her savings. I recently watched some interviews with her and was deeply underwhelmed. It's like watching Nadella saying total nonsense while the media paints him as some sort of marvellous genius.
Don't be lured into the MBA-spread myth that goes something along the lines of, "if you're smart, why aren't you rich?"
A lot of GNU developers are brilliant people; few of them are affluent and this includes the founder of GNU.
Anyway, we eagerly await another year of bubble-bursting action. Over the holiday period I decided to make laptop and site backups for all laptops and all sites. We managed to tidy up wiki pages a little (still far from done) and we have good articles in the pipeline. We still have several ongoing series, including the GitHub series that started in 2021.
Always remember that just because you hear something different (to what you're accustomed to hearing) doesn't mean you hear something false. Trillions of dollars are spent to change how people perceive the world; a portion of that money goes to Wikipedia, albeit the mass media plays a more considerable role in shaping people's worldviews on almost every topic. Concepts like "wrongthink" are branches of that.
Techrights never tried to be "popular" (calling for boycott isn't good for employment, either), just to be honest. Our honesty, however blunt it may seem, brought us audiences. Suffice to say, without audiences we wouldn't be this active since 2006. Over 40,000 blog posts in over 17 years.
This month we expect to cover EPO affairs every day and some time later this month we expect Microsoft layoffs, based on some clues (reading between the lines). Our foremost priority and focus is software freedom and abolition of software patent - i.e. the very same thing as in 2006.
We kindly remind readers that for server/hosting bills we rely on the readers. We never took money from anyone but readers. When you help cover the bills you are basically covering the cost of bandwidth that is the pages we serve to you, the reader. My "salary" for running this site is zero. I only ever lost money on the site and that will never change. This site isn't about money but a principled pursuit of facts and justice, not some empty ideology. I sacrificed my potential to earn a decent living because this site has value to society. The goal is to explain what's really happening, especially when it contradicts IBM- and Microsoft-funded "media". █
"Now it was time for the FTC to get tough again, and Microsoft was a great way to start flexing its muscles. But first, the FTC needed to get approval from the Department of Justice. Anxiously awaiting the sanction, investigators began collecting news clippings to bone up on Microsoft and all the subtle complexities of the software industry. In May of 1990, the DoJ gave the green light, freeing the FTC to open their probe. With no shortage of help from Microsoft's competitors, the FTC collected mounds of evidence showing that Microsoft and IBM had been in cahoots from the beginning."
--Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft's PR mogul