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Posts published by “FOSS Force”

Torvald’s Diplomacy, Elop’s Riches & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Redmond Ups the Ante on Its Buyback Program

No sooner had we told you last Friday of Microsoft’s offer to buy certain “gently used” iPads for up to $200 in credit vouchers, good at your friendly neighborhood Microsoft store, than they went and upped the ante. What they’ve done is something of a reverse interpretation of a line from the old Proctor and Bergman comedy album from the early 70’s, TV or Not TV. To paraphrase, “What was once two hundred is now three hundred fifty.”

Yup. You heard us right. On Friday your old iPad was worth two hundred smackers to the Microsoft folk–which had to be taken in store credit. By Sunday morning, it was three fifty as cash loaded on a Visa card. Talk about inflation. Not only that, Redmond’s buyback offer now extends beyond a limited range of iPads to include many more devices. Now they’ll take Android devices, both phones and tablets, from Samsung, Lenovo and others, as well as iPhones and iPads. We understand they’re even offering to buyback BlackBerrys.

Votes Tallied on the GPL and the NSA’s Spying

Yikes! We got behind in looking at the results of the polls we run here on FOSS Force, which means we’ve got some catching up to do.

What was your opinion on the GPL?

Back on June 30th we asked you, “Which of the following best describes your thoughts about the GPL?” The poll’s been active since, though for most of that time it’s been buried in the article What’s Your Take on the GPL? back in our archives. We took it down just this morning.

In this poll we offered the following options as answers:

Redmond’s Used iPads, Spy Wars Escalate & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Court rules on Facebook privacy

If an employee makes a post on Facebook using a privacy setting that excludes the boss from seeing it, that post is off limits to the employer. Unless, that is, the poster has a turncoat friend who willingly supplies the post to the employer with no prodding to do so. That’s evidently the gist of a ruling handed down in August, as reported by PCWorld on Sunday.

The case involved Deborah Ehling, who was suspended by Monmouth-Ocean Hospital Service Corp. (MONOC) after she posted on Facebook in June of 2009 a response to news that a white supremacist had opened fire and killed a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Microsoft: Knock, Knock, Knocking on Nokia’s Door

FOSS Week in Review

The Microsoft saga continues…

Ten or twelve years ago somebody noticed that no one except IBM ever entered into a partnership with Microsoft and survived. Since then a few got lucky, but not many, and one of them wasn’t Nokia. For the life of us, we can’t figure what ever convinced the Finnish folk that hiring Stephen Elop, then head of Redmond’s business software division, as CEO was a good idea. We guess they never really grokked the whole understanding-history-or-being-doomed-to-repeat-it concept.

When Mr. Elop decided to scrap all plans for all mobile operating systems other than Windows Phone at Nokia, red flags should’ve gone up. We figure the only reason they didn’t is that the Finns spent most of the 20th century nurturing an aversion to red flags. In this case, the aversion cost them dearly. They bet the farm on an OS that no one else wanted and now the used-to-be-leader in the cell phone business is just another division of Microsoft.

Phishing Scam Masquerades As LinkedIn Connection Request

We’ve noticed in the last week there’s a new email phishing campaign that uses emails masquerading as LinkedIn connection requests.

Although most tech savvy users long ago learned email best security practices (don’t click on links in emails unless you’re absolutely sure you know the source of the email), sometimes we get lulled into complacency and automatically click on links from trusted sources.

And the Best FOSS or Linux Blog Is…

In this competition there’s a winner but no losers.

Although only one site gets to call themselves the “FOSS Force Best FOSS or Linux Blog–2013” winner, in reality everybody in the competition has won.

Today we are announcing the winner from a field of ten great blogs, all of which have already won our elimination round. Before that there were 19 truly great blogs in our competition, nine of which had been chosen by visitors to our site, the other ten being hand-picked by us here at FOSS Force as a way of getting things going. They are all winners just by dint of being in the running.

Our Email, Down for 18 Hours, Now Back Up

About 8 pm last night the email accounts we use here at FOSS Force went down. The problem was a server located at a datacenter in Pennsylvania that suddenly disappeared from the Internet. The server was used by us to host our oldest website, Alternative Approaches, a site we made unavailable to the public a few months ago as we’ve worked to reboot the site with a new look and feel. However, we have continued to utilize the domain as our main email domain. The site is our only web property that doesn’t reside on the server we use to host FOSS Force our other web properties.

Second Round of Our Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog Competition

We were hoping to have 20 to 25 blogs for you to choose from here in round two of our competition to see who wins the honors as FOSS Force Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog–2013. We end up offering you a total of 19.

Voters in our qualifying poll that finished at noon today wrote-in plenty of web sites for us to consider. The trouble was, most of them didn’t meet the criteria we set-out in the article titled What’s Your Favorite FOSS or Linux Blog? which was published on July 29th when we began this competition.

To a degree, we expected that. We knew some voters would write-in names of great Linux sites that in no way qualify as personal blogs. That they did, placing votes for many of our favorite sites and for some we think downright silly. So we first cleared out votes for sites that obviously don’t qualify, such as Omg! Ubuntu!, phoronix and OStatic.

After taking care of that task we were left with a long list of sites. As most were unknown to us, we had

Are You Ready For Round Two?

The first round of voting in our quest to see whom our visitors will vote “Best Personal FOSS or Linux Blog–2013” has ended. Right now we’re busy checking out all of the blogs that received write-in votes to see which qualify for round two and which do not. We’re estimating that by late afternoon or early evening eastern time in the United States we’ll be ready to announce our line-up for round two.

Round two will be an elimination round from a field of 20 to 25 blogs taken from the results of the poll that just ended. There will be no write-in votes, but voters will still be allowed to vote for up to two blogs.

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