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Topics - zridling [ switch to compact view ]

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101
General Software Discussion / 25 Ubuntu tips for beginners
« on: November 10, 2010, 08:01 AM »
25 Ubuntu tips for beginners
http://www.techradar...for-beginners-906002

For the beginners among us.

102
Living Room / Why Apple's Distortion Field Works
« on: November 09, 2010, 04:45 AM »
Apple-PsychoJobs-660x747.jpg

Navneet Alang nails this familiar meme with a good article, Why Apple's Distortion Field Works:

So why is that that Steve Jobs and Apple in general command so much attention? And more to the point, why does this Apple “reality distortion field exist”? ... It is Apple who is showing everyone, rather than tech geeks, what technology is capable of and how it makes your life better. ...What’s more, love them or hate them, Apple has innovated in creative, exciting ways.

103
[via Digitizor]
Happy to see the Oracle cancer excised from one open source project as developers are fleeing OpenOffice. Long live LibreOffice!
http://digitizor.com...eave-openoffice-org/

After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org fell into the hands of Oracle, as did a lot of other products. So, last month a few very prominent members of the OpenOffice.org community decided to form The Document Foundation and fork OpenOffice.org as LibreOffice, possibly fearing that it could go the OpenSolaris way. They invited Oracle to join The Document Foundation and to donate the brand “OpenOffice.org.” LibreOffice was chosen as a temporary name until Oracle agrees to donate the brand. Oracle was not pleased and asks those who founded The Document Foundation to leave OpenOffice.org citing “conflict of interest.” As Oracle had given them no choice, they left OpenOffice.org along with 33 other developers.

LibreOffice has already got backing from Google (ChromeOS), Novell (openSUSE),  Red Hat (Fedora), Canonical (Ubuntu), et al. Mark Shuttleworth had even said that it may replace OpenOffice.org in future Ubuntu releases. So, the future looks bright for LibreOffice and The Document Foundation.


____________________________
It's nice to know a corporation can't kill an open source project.

104
General Software Discussion / Goodbye OpenOffice, Hello LibreOffice
« on: October 11, 2010, 01:44 PM »
HappyGirl.jpg
Since Oracle acquired Sun, it's shown aggressive hostility toward open source software by flooding the software landscape with patent lawsuits. With the acquisition of Sun came its more overt corporate control of OpenOffice. Not content to have a corporation control such a large open source project, the Document Foundation has forked OpenOffice into LibreOffice, which is "a better match to the values of our contributors, users, and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient, transparent, and inclusive Community." Among other things, their first goal is to clean the kludge in the code and improve its auto-update feature.

Linux distros are already updating their repositories with the LibreOffice beta, and it's only a matter of time before OpenOffice dies a well-deserved death.

105
Living Room / Who's suing whom in the telecom industry?
« on: October 07, 2010, 03:39 AM »
Love this site, Information is Beautiful. Here's a rundown thanks to the Guardian:

whos_suing_whom.png
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

106
Where "software" was once fun, interesting, and useful, now it's retreating into fenced-in arenas governed by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, et al. Software has morphed into browser apps and extensions, most of which seems intent on connecting us to -- and fencing us into -- distinct corporate portals built solely for their profit by making my internet experience is limited by the products they want to sell me. And mind you, corporations do not share my views of liberty, but instead are intent on restricting what search terms I can enter, what search results I will get, what words I can use according to their almost religious Terms of Service "agreements," and on top of it all, they get to view, share, sell, or lock me out of my online data at their pleasure. As a result, it's 2010 and I'm bored (and boring, I know). I have dozens of sites I visit daily, but most of them evoke a "meh" at best.

apps_header2010a.jpg

I want knowledge,
I want intellectual liberty,
I want no restrictions on my curiosities,
I want creativity, not [endless] legal controls,
I want productivity, not merely connectivity.

107
Living Room / Is Antenna Climbing the Scariest Job Ever?
« on: September 15, 2010, 11:10 PM »
Check out this incredible Point-of-View tower climbing video in full screen mode before it gets taken down!
http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=gQv-o5Kgbko

tower-climbing1.jpg

I lose my stomach just watching it! (via The Online Engineer blog)

108
Developer's Corner / Kirk Wants a New Programming Language
« on: September 14, 2010, 12:58 PM »
Kirk has a good rant:
http://kirkwylie.blo...amming-language.html

Dear Lazyweb and Programming Language Inventors:
I want a new programming language. Although I seldom code these days for OpenGamma, I've wanted a new programming language for quite some time. I don't want an extreme language (in syntax or constraints); I don't want a purely experimental language; I don't want a faddish language. What I want is what Stephen Colebourne coins a "journeyman language." ...a journeyman language is a programming language designed for journeyman programmers. And those guys are the hundreds of thousands of men and women working on business applications and systems programming every day.

___________________________
As usual, the comments are informative.

109
The SoftSailor site has a jump on the new Ubuntu 10.10 wallpapers and themes, and a few versions of the software included under its GNOME 2.32 desktop environment. I swear some are familiar.

ubuntu1010walls-large_016-500x333.jpg

PS: I swear picture #5 looks like a wet nipple! Freud would say sometimes a raindrop is just a raindrop.

110
General Software Discussion / What HTML5 can do -- cool site
« on: September 06, 2010, 11:07 PM »
Check out The Wilderness Downtown, preferably using Chrome. Hit full screen, key in your address, and wait for it to load.

wilderness-downtown.jpg

111
Living Room / MIT's biopic of 4chan's founder, Chris Poole (moot)
« on: August 31, 2010, 09:36 AM »
Julian Dibbell does the honors of telling us more about Chris Poole, 4chan's founder.

http://www.technolog...eview.com/web/25997/

"Like many people, Poole thinks there are better ways than Moses's to manage the tangled social, cultural, and infrastructural needs of a community of millions. But unlike most people--let alone most 22-year-olds--he actually has some experience doing just that. Seven years ago, Poole created the website 4chan, an online community that now has nearly 11 million monthly users and is, in some respects, as unruly as any metropolis. The site is what's known as an image board, a type of online message forum that encourages users to post both images and text, and its users now contribute more than a million messages a day, their content tending in the aggregate toward a unique mix of humor, pornography, offensiveness, and, at times, borderline legality. It has long been one of the largest message forums in the world, but Poole, the only owner 4chan has ever had, continues to run it as he has always done: in his spare time, with a little help from online volunteers and just enough advertising revenue to cover bandwidth costs."

___________________________
If you haven't visited 4chan yet, it suffers from the same ennui that the rest of the net sees. After a while, you won't see anything new, you'll just be looking (again) for something you once found.

WARNING: 4chan is NSFW due to nudity, language, etc.

112
General Software Discussion / 27 Good Reasons to Love Linux
« on: August 31, 2010, 09:19 AM »
linux-wall113.jpg

Linuxaria serves up 27 good reasons to love Linux on hubpages.com. Among them are:
- Ease of use (yes, believe it!)
- Free software and games
- No more piracy, registration, validation, verification, or cost
- One-click upgrades and updates
- Great music players
- Stability, viruses aren't a concern, no more defrag, no more reboots
- Choose your desktop (want it to look and work like Win7 or OSX? no problem)
- Use workspaces, not 11 different windows open at one time
- Support is universal

_______________________
More Tux wallpapers

113
A.J. Venter cleverly lays out the case on Why computer programs should not be patentable -- in easy-to-understand terms.

code101010101.jpg

Programming a computer is, essentially, just discovering a number that suits the programmers wishes.

Make the vairable X equal to 0;
Start a loop here:
Write the binary representation of X into a new file.
increase X by 1
continue the above loop until the program is interrupted by deliberately killing it (an infinite loop);

With this simple program – I can create an exact copy of every single program ever written and – this is important – every single program that CAN ever be written.


*Text files, executable, source code, pdf’s all files in fact are saved as just one gigantic number on a computer. The computer just follows a set of rules to make sense of them. The exact rules differ between architectures – on an 8-bit computer if you tell it that the file is “text” it will read every 8 digits, take that as a number by itself and find a corresponding letter from a chart (known as the ascii set), on 32-bit and higher computers it reads more – and can refer to longer and more complete charts like unicode – but ultimately – what gets saved on the disk is still just one big number. Here-in lies the secret to what lets the “universal Turing machine” actually work – software is data.

114
I'm curious to see which archiver DC members are using these days. Most of them are cross-platform, but which is your favorite and why?

115
Living Room / Yea, but will your emotional robot mow my lawn?
« on: August 09, 2010, 12:28 AM »
robot_468x331.jpg

Alok Jha writes for the Guardian: First robot able to develop and show emotions is unveiled:
Nao is a robot — the world's first that can develop and display emotions. He can form bonds with the people he meets depending on how he is treated. The more he interacts with someone, the more Nao learns a person's moods and the stronger the bonds become.
__________________________
It would also be helpful with old folks living alone, as long as they're not freaked out. More important: Will emotional-bot laugh when I fart? (I know I do.)

The implications are funny and serious.

116
Living Room / Five Reasons Why People Hate Apple
« on: August 04, 2010, 11:42 PM »
Apple can't seem to catch a break lately, but just ask Microsoft, that comes with the territory. Mitch Wagner gets to the heart of the matter with 5 reasons why people hate Apple:

Every company has its opponents, but Apple really gets people worked up. Some people hate Apple a lot, more than they hate Nazis or Smurfs. They leave angry comments on Apple blogs. Based on my extensive observations of the species, Apple-haters fall into five categories. If you're an Apple-hater, which one of these categories do you fit in?

  • You believe buying Apple undermines your individuality
  • You hate Apple culture
  • You've had a bad experience with Apple products
  • Apple isn't right for you
  • You hate Apple's closed architecture

Overall, my beef with the App Store restrictions aren't that they exist, they're that they need to be better. I want a native Google Voice App -- Google developed one, but Apple rejected it. I want an app that will let me update all my podcasts automatically, over the air, without having to sync to iTunes; Apple blocked a podcasting app in 2008.... While Apple kills those useful apps, it allows more than a hundred fart apps, including iFart Mobile, Atomic Fart, Fart Piano, 1,000,000 Fart Generator, and something called "Bluetooth Fart" (because, presumably, USB and Firewire farts just weren't good enough).

You stay classy, Apple.

117
Living Room / Richard Stallman Answers Your Questions
« on: July 30, 2010, 06:34 AM »
In a fascinating interview with this odd and sometimes lovable man, he admits:
  • His biggest failing is how so many people confuse free software with open source software.
  • Doesn't care for Hollywood movies.
  • Recommends you buy the best books using cash, in a store.

rms-web.jpg

Do you have any pets?
RMS: No. I spend most of my time traveling, so I could not have any pets.
If it were possible, I would like to have a friendly parrot.

____________________
If you could have one proprietary package/software released as Free
Software, which would it be and why?

RMS: Of the programs I know of, I think freeing Autocad would give the
biggest boost to the free software community.

____________________
We should use democracy to organize and together impose limits on what
 the rich can do to the rest of us. That's what democracy was invented for!

____________________
Why hasn't GNU or the FSF tried to make a market ("app store") for Free Software?
RMS: Would it even be possible? There is no platform that directs users to
get their free software from our app store. We don't make such
platforms. In general, each GNU/Linux distro has its own package
system and repositories. Each has its own developers' group which
maintains them.... I won't claim it is impossible to have a corporate controlled app
store for a system which is free software. I don't see how, but if
someone manages to do this, more power to her.

____________________
The main shortcoming of Linux is at the level of device support. The
obstacle there isn't a lack of ability among Linux developers, but
rather the use of devices whose specs are secret.

____________________
When a company says, "Don't inspect our plant, just trust us to
maintain safety standards," we need to respond, "You're probably
trying to cheat, so we will inspect you on a random day each year and
charge you what it costs."

____________________
It is ok to use a nonfree program for the purpose of developing its free replacement.
____________________
What is vim doing better than emacs?
RMS: Sorry, I have never tried using vim. I never felt I deserved such a large penitence ;-).

118
Living Room / Build a $200 Linux PC -- How-to by ExtremeTech
« on: July 26, 2010, 06:55 AM »
I love the idea of building a cheap PC for either a relative or someone who doesn't think they could use one (such as my 75-year old mom). ExtremeTech came through with an honest build of a cheap PC, explaining each sacrifice for price. And they still managed to get a decent machine out of it.

200-dollarpc1,00.jpg

Times are still tough out there, but our needs and desires don't always flag just because the economy does. If an accident or an equipment failure has punched an unexpected hole in your computing life, you may be in need of a system—any system—to fill it. Or maybe you've discovered that your family just needs one more box to use as a Web terminal to keep the more powerful systems free more often. Whatever the circumstance, you may be tempted to drop $500 or even more on one of the cheaper, pre-fab models you can find at Costco, Wal-Mart, or from one of the major manufacturers. But once you've factored in all the attendant costs, taxes, and shipping, you could be spending a lot more than you planned—and that's something to avoid, especially when every penny counts.

Even if you need a computer right away, there are plenty of good reasons to build one rather than buy one. You control the parts, so you get exactly what you need at the price you can best afford. You're assured of being able to upgrade any (or all) of the pieces later, when you have more money to spend. And, perhaps most importantly, you get the satisfaction of doing it yourself and maintaining complete control over it from the very instant you open the boxes. No matter how little you want to drop, building your own computer is still the best way to go.


So we asked ourselves: What's the lowest point at which these two goals could intersect? If we needed a simple computer right away, and wanted to spend as little as possible, what could we build? We knew we wanted to aim low, almost ridiculously low—so we decided on what seemed like almost an unthinkable total: $200, which would include everything needed for the base computer itself (but not counting the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, or tax and shipping charges).

119
The power of the browser has grown substantially in the last ten years. We now use the Web to multi-task the activities we juggle every day, like vacation plans, purchases, sharing pictures, listening to music, reading email, and writing a blog post.

It’s hard to keep everything straight with dozens of tabs all crammed into a little strip along the top of your browser. Your tab with a search to find a pizza parlor gets mixed up with your tabs on your favorite band. Often, it’s easier to open a new tab than to try to find the open tab you already have. Worse, how many of us keep tabs open as reminders of something we want to do or read later? We’re all suffering from infoguilt.

We need a way to organize browsing, to see all of our tabs at once, and focus on the task at hand. In short, we need a way to get back control of our online lives.


Enter: Tab Candy. Watch the video. This will be a hit, I promise.

120
Julie Sartain of PC World gives us Five Reasons You Don't Need Microsoft Office 2010, and she doesn't hold back:

(1) No more upgrades. If you are looking for an upgrade price, forget it. Microsoft has decided not to offer upgrade pricing anymore.
Next to Windows Millennium, Vista, the Office 2007 Ribbon, and the Kin bombshell, this is the worst marketing decision Microsoft has ever made.

(2) Free Alternative Programs. OpenOffice, et al.
Other alternative programs include IBM's Lotus Symphony, Google Docs, and Zoho--all free--and ThinkFree, which has both a free and a fee-based version.

(3) Few New Features, Nothing Impressive. You can save Word docs to SharePoint--or just copy and paste them in. Other new features include paste preview, so you can preview the page before you paste items into your document--or you could just go ahead and paste the items in, then select undo if you don't like how it looks.
There are a few other minor features. However, I still don't think these are anything to get excited about, and they're certainly not worth the new ‘non-upgradable' price tag.

(4) The Ribbon Changed, but It's Still a Bomb. The only real change worth mentioning on the Ribbon bar is its capability to customize the menus.
I hated it in Office 2007 and I still hate it. After using it for weeks and cursing it daily, I finally purchased a program from AddIn Tools that, when installed, redesigns the Ribbon bar menus back to the old Office 2003 menus.

(5) Simultaneous Editing. [This] is nothing more than a shared document feature.
This not a cool function. It actually creates a lot more confusion than it's worth, especially if you have ever used Adobe Acrobat to perform these same tasks. Every time I have ever used sharing and collaboration in Acrobat, it has resulted in chaos with one user changing what another just wrote or edited causing conflict between all participants because the original is no longer available unless someone had the foresight to make a backup copy.

_________________________________
I was with her until she suggested Corel's WordPerfect. Really?!

121
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols shares his thoughts on starting out with Linux:

linux-first-steps-hw.jpg

Every now and again someone writes me and asks me "What's the best way for me to get started in Linux?" Over the years, I've answered in several different ways, but here's the summarization of my thoughts.
___________________
Definitely some things I haven't thought of, but I do like leaving your Windows system intact.

122
General Software Discussion / Aloha, free HTML5 Editor
« on: July 20, 2010, 05:31 PM »
aloha-cover.jpg

Aloha, a free HTML5 Editor, is available under AGPLv3 license. "You can edit any website content instantaneously. You see the changes the moment you type. No training necessary to edit content of a website, wiki, blog or any other application." And it integrates with your browser, blog, etc. easily.

Nice!

123
The hacking business model -- not just about the code!

hacker_9e8aa864ae_m.jpg

Purpose
- Create a sustainable business model that can be adopted and adapted by others.
- Create a fair and democratic company that is owned by the workers.
- Have long-term, trustworthy and meaningful relationships with our staff and customers.

Principles
- Egalitarian: The belief that all people should be treated equally. This includes equality, non-discrimination and inclusivity.
- Sustainable: We have a long-term view on our business. We watch our profits & spend wisely, we take care of each other, we support the things we depend on.
- Transparent: We communicate in an honest and genuine way. Any information or process that can be made open, will be made open.
- Fun: Create a workplace where people can have fun and want to work.
- Agile: Be flexible, receptive & adaptive, especially when dealing with staff and customers.

Methods
Concrete tools for helping us live according to our principles, including:
- Consensus-based decision making.
- Corporate transparency - any information or process that can be made open, should be made open.
- Licensing that helps benefit our company, our staff, our customers, our partners and society at large.
- Profit-sharing with staff, contributors and worthy causes.
- Don't try to change people. Focus on getting the best from their strengths. Develop ways to work around their weaknesses.
- Prefer to work with people who share our values.
- Work against patents and other legislation that harms individual rights.

_______________________
More details:
http://askmonty.org/...cking_business_model

124
Living Room / Weekend moment of zen -- Caturday!
« on: June 25, 2010, 06:43 AM »
byz.jpg

I feel better now.

125
Living Room / Is Apple a victim of sour grapes?
« on: June 24, 2010, 09:13 AM »
Headline in Thursday's New York Times:

apple-a-victim01.png

Hilarious.
http://www.nytimes.c...hnology/24apple.html

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