From a BBC article written by Richard Stallman:

"To pay so much attention to Bill Gates' retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers."

Read it in full at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7487060.stm

I am now in Espoo, a suburb of Helsinki, Finland. I will be here for approximately two weeks, teaching a short course on Global Software Management at Evtek. After I got an account at the school, I logged into the system. The desktops are Windows XP, with a Novell authentication layer running printers and shared drives. No surprises there, although I would have imagined that an Active Directory backend would make more sense to have an integrated experience.

Its one thing to explore the limits of what technology can do for you, but it takes an entirely different mindset to figure out and limit what technology may do for you. How cheap can laptops get and still be useful? We are seeing this with many new products such as the XO-1 laptop from OLPC, The Eee PC from Asus, and many other ultra low-cost PCs as they are being called. One common theme across these cheap laptops has been the use of Linux. This article from PC World point out to an interesting effort from those people in Redmond. From PC World:

It seems that Adobe is working towards removing some barriers to the adoption of its Flash technology. This may very well be due to pressure from potential competition such as Silverlight. From Adobe's site:

"...as part of Adobe’s ongoing commitment to enable Web innovation, Adobe will continue to open access to Adobe Flash technology, accelerating the deployment of content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). This work will include:

---

[ login to post comments | read more | send this story | 1435 reads ]

I came across this neat project called InetBoot. This is a web-enabled boot loader for booting into ISO files. The bootloader is a small ISO (5.3 mb) itself that does some initial booting, networking, and then a request for the ISO over httpfs. The incoming ISO is then mounted and the process goes on from there. Its neat in that with a small local bootable image, you can send in ISOs over HTTP instead of NFS. I am planning on trying ti out for the Live CDs for OLPC.

Fresh from the Slashdot spigot:

"News.com reports Microsoft has finally started offering an ad-funded version of Microsoft Works in some countries. Users who run the software see a small ad as they are writing their document or editing their spreadsheet. Although the program has the ability to update its set of ads online, today it runs mostly ads for Microsoft and a few partners, all of which ship with the product itself. Microsoft remains cagey on the details of where you can find Works SE. The company has been testing Works SE in 5 countries: The United States, France, Canada, Poland and the United Kingdom. It is available only through select computer makers and Microsoft won't say which computer makers those are. However, it seems Sony is offering it in the US."

---

[ login to post comments | read more | send this story | 1787 reads ]

While plain rsync is fine for making backups periodically, rsync itself will not encrypt your data. Duplicity is a tool for that job. From their site:

Duplicity backs directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local file server. Because duplicity uses librsync, the incremental archives are space efficient and only record the parts of files that have changed since the last backup. Because duplicity uses GnuPG to encrypt and/or sign these archives, they will be safe from spying and/or modification by the server.

---

[ login to post comments | read more | send this story | 2242 reads ]

This is amusing:

We now have a "Bay Area Linux Events" calendar, which is a Google Calendar aggregation of events for all LUGs and LUG-related events. You will see this in a block on the left panel of the site. The scroll bar is perpetual, i.e. it keeps scrolling as long as it has events. You can also click on the "Google Calendar" link at the bottom of the block to add it to your own Google Calendar. This calendar is primarily hosted by Bill Ward of PenLUG.

Links to Google Calendar are at: 

• XML link at [ login to post comments | read more | send this story | 2963 reads ]