July 8, 2008
by sjvn01
4 Comments
Some of us thought, based on the lack of any real evidence in his trial, that Hans Reiser might be innocent of the supposed murder of his wife, Nina Reiser. We were wrong. On July 7th, Reiser led representatives of the Alameda County District Attorney’s office, and Oakland Police to her body.
July 7, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments
What part of “Yahoo doesn’t want a thing to do with you” did Ballmer not get? The new lord and master of Microsoft seems to be deaf, as well as dumb, in his latest attempt to try to buy Yahoo.
Microsoft, along with billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who at 72 seems to be losing his business smarts, confirmed that they still wanted to buy Yahoo. All that Yahoo has to do, to get in on this new deal, is fire its board of directors.
In other words: “Dear Yahoo leadership. You recently turned our offer down to buy your company. Then, you decided to turn down our offer to buy the search part of your company. Please quit your jobs so we can replace you with people who will take our lowball offer. Thank you very much. Ballmer and Icahn.”
Just how stupid is Ballmer? The deal is dead.
July 5, 2008
by sjvn01
2 Comments
Mozilla’s successful attempt to set a world record for downloads of a single program, Firefox 3 was dumb. It was also incredibly successful.
Does anyone really care about how many copies of a program are downloaded in a day? In 2008? When a program can be downloaded from hundreds of different sites? When BitTorrent and other P2P (peer-to-peer) networks makes measuring file ‘downloads’ more of an exercise in speculative fiction than a science?
I guess so because, not even counting the fuzzy downloads of P2P networks and the like, Firefox was downloaded 8.3-million times in one day. This is spiffy. Meaningless in and of itself, but spiffy.
Having said that, I will say Mozilla’s pounding the drum for downloading Firefox did do one good thing. It did a great job of marketing Firefox.
July 5, 2008
by sjvn01
5 Comments
Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux may only be a beta, but it’s one heck of a beta.
I didn’t care for Adobe Flash video at first. It was just another proprietary audio/video format in a world already over-flowing with them.
Three things have happened to change my mind. First, Adobe made it possible to use the open H.264 video and HE-AAC (High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding) audio standards in Flash SWF (Shockwave Flash) files. Then, they made the Adobe Flash player available on Linux, and, this May, Adobe announced that it was opening up the SWF and FLV/F4V (Flash Video) formats and dumping the format’s licensing fees. At about the same time, Adobe also released the Flash 10 beta for Linux, as well as some other desktop operating systems you may have of heard of: Mac OS X and Windows.
July 3, 2008
by sjvn01
8 Comments
Being grumpy is almost part of the job description for developers.
Recently though several KDE developers came right out and asked, “Does KDE even need (certain) users?” While, Troy Unrau, a KDE developer and perhaps best known as the author of stories for KDE News, opened this can of worm by saying “This is a rant,” it was soon taken in earnest. Unrau’s opinion was quickly seconded by another KDE developer, Jason Harris, who said, “KDE, like many other open-source projects, doesn’t really need users at all, whether they are poisonous or not.” Instead, both Unrau and Harris wanted to see KDE get more developers.
In the end though, KDE has ended up with at least one less developer. Unrau has quit KDE. He puts the blame, in part, on simply having too much to do and too little time to do it and on both internal and external criticism of KDE’s recent development direction.
July 2, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment
I want; I mean I really want, an Apple MacBook Air. Mind you, I wouldn’t kick a Lenovo ThinkPad X300 or Toshiba Portege R500 out of my hotel bedroom either. If you’re a Mac or Windows user you’ve got several excellent top-of-the-line ultra-thin laptop choices. If you’re a desktop Linux user, your choices aren’t that great. So far.
Oh, there are excellent pre-installed Linux laptops. For a full-powered one I see it as almost being a coin-toss between the Lenovo R61 with SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP 2 and the Dell 1420N. The quick and dirty on how to choose between them is that the Lenovo works extremely well with office network environments, especially those that use AD (Active Directory), while the Dell with commercial DVD-playback built-in is a better home user buy. One last thought on solid working Linux laptops: Dell will be moving to Ubuntu 8.04 any time now, so you may want wait a tick before buying one. Good machines and I paid my own money to get an R61, but these are not ultra-thin sexy laptops.