Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Unfortunately, Larry’s a little under the weather today, so here I am…
Put that on your Chromebook and run it
We hear from Softpedia that Chromixium is just about ready for prime time. Well, that may be jumping the gun a little bit. What we really hear is that the distro has now gone from beta to release candidate, and that a honest-to-goodness 1.0 stable version is virtually just around the corner. Trouble is: we’re not sure yet just how far away we are from that corner. Shouldn’t be too far, however. The beta version was only released in February, so these developers aren’t wasting time.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Before Google, search engines didn’t get in the way too much.
This isn’t necessarily Google’s fault. There were a lot fewer websites then, and also many fewer people looking for them. Even then, however, unscrupulous web designers were working overtime to scam the system in an effort to gain ranking — which is why search engines now only pay scant attention to the “keyword” meta tag, which is so often stuffed with keyword spam that it’s not to be trusted.
Obviously, search engine ranking is important because it’s one of the main ways people find a site. People can’t read content they can’t find. And if nobody finds a site’s content to read it, what’s the use of writing it? So getting an article off of page twenty in a search result and onto page one is key — which is why you read so much about SEO, or “search engine optimization.”
SEO is basically giving Google what Google wants, for the purpose of improving the chances of getting a page to the top of a search list. For content sites, SEO can be sort of a deal with the devil, as writers who pay too much attention to “best SEO practices” will find that doing so will effect the quality of their writing.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
I have an ancient box with Windows XP as its only operating system gathering cobwebs in a space under my desk, right where it was the last time I used it. That was back in April of last year, on the day that Microsoft quit supporting XP. Up until then, it’d been used mainly to process credit card orders from an online store I manage. The bank’s required software for processing won’t run on anything but Windows, so I kept it around for that purpose.
A look at Windows systems use on my old machine, first as Firefox is loaded, then as Thunderbird loads. This is after AV had finished updating.When I took it out of commission, I decided I was through with Windows for good. No more dual booting. No more keeping a Windows machine running all day just to process plastic. No more blue screens. No more rebooting for no apparent reason except that’s what Windows wants.
I cancelled my deal with the bank, switched the site to taking PayPal only and shut down the box for good.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Back when Edward Snowden first began revealing details of the depth of NSA spying on foreign governments and companies, as well as U.S. citizens, I said that this would end up costing U.S. tech companies dearly. Now we’re beginning to see just how much: $47 billion according to Forrester Research. As large as that figure is, it could have been worse. Back in 2013, the folks at Forrester were estimating that the stateside tech industry would take a $180 billion hit.
By design, the research company’s numbers don’t reflect the amount of money spent by U.S. taxpayers funding the NSA’s operations. Nor do they indicate how much of this $47 billion is being born by the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, as far as I can tell. What I do know is that many foreign governments have been publicly investing in Linux and open source projects since Snowden’s revelations that back doors for the NSA have been built into many proprietary U.S. enterprise software products.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Columbia, South Carolina’s Posscon conference is still a couple of weeks away and already nearly sold out. We’re hearing from the conference organizers that anyone planning on attending who hasn’t gotten tickets yet should take care of that pronto, before it’s too late.
Posscon, primarily a developers’ conference, has a few talks on the schedule which might fly beneath the radar for the hardcore coders and developers who make up the lion’s share of those in attendance. Here’s five that catch my interest and which would be on my dance ticket if I was able to make the event:
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Larry Cafiero’s off doing some important Larry stuff and I was told I could avoid detention if I wrote the Week in Review for him, so here I am.
LibreOffice as SaaS
This from our “it’s about time but it ain’t time yet” department. The Document Foundation, those fine folks who bring us the LibreOffice productivity suite, announced on Wednesday the unveiling of an online SaaS version of the suite, complete with the catchy name LibreOffice Online or LOOL.
Well, it wasn’t exactly an unveiling. It was more an announcement of things-we-are-working-on-and-are-really-really-sure-are-going-to-happen. According to the notice on the Document Foundation blog, LOOL isn’t scheduled to pull into the station just quite yet. According to the blog: “The availability of LibreOffice Online will be communicated at a later stage.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Last night I bought a Tracfone online. This morning, when I bring up FOSS Force on the browser, I’m greeted by an ad hawking Tracfones. Likewise, a few months ago after I purchased a coolant reservoir for my 27 year old BMW, I was greeted by ads on every site I visited for companies specializing in parts for old BMWs. We’re all used to this, right? Even if we just conduct a simple Google search, we’re liable to be followed around by ads pertaining to that search for hours, if not days or weeks.
Well, guess what? This sort of targeting is coming to your TV soon.
Ad buyers have been saying for quite a while that television advertising is something of a bargain these days when compared to the prices they’re paying to advertise on the Internet. Much of that has to do with targeting, which Google has perfected to a surgical science on the Internet, with a precision that pretty much hasn’t been possible on television. On TV, a company selling articles which primarily appeal to young teen age girls, for example, can buy time on a show that has high numbers in that demographic, but that’s about it — and that’s kept television time relatively cheap.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Ken Starks put another well deserved feather in his cap on Saturday when he accepted an award for Reglue from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) at the LibrePlanet conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Reglue was announced as this year’s winner of the Project of Social Benefit Award by FSF executive director John Sullivan, who also announced that Sébastien Jodogne had won this year’s award for Advancement of Free Software. The event took place on the MIT campus.
For those of you who are new to the FOSS community, Ken Starks founded the nonprofit Reglue, then known as the HeliOS Project, in 2005 to put refurbished computers in the hands of school aged children whose families couldn’t otherwise afford them. In the ten years since its inception, Reglue has placed over 1,100 computers with children living in the Austin, Texas area, and has been both a model and inspiration for other organizations with similar goals across the country.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
There’s little doubt that a few eyebrows were raised by the news on Friday, when Larry Cafiero reported on FOSS Force about Canonical’s partnership with Microsoft involving Microsoft’s OCS hardware and Ubuntu’s open source Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) deployment product. Those with a little memory might wonder if this is a case of history repeating itself, as we’ve seen Microsoft court aspiring princess distros before, with SUSE, not long after the distro was purchased by Novell, a company with an uneven history.
A graphic from the Ubuntu web site, touting the distro’s partnership with Microsoft.Shortly after the turn of the century, Utah based Novell, desperate to stem shrinking revenues, announced it’s intentions of becoming a major Linux and open source player. During the 1980s and 90s the company had flourished in the networking market with its NetWare operating system, a business that was by 2001 in rapid decline, mostly because Windows was now able to network out-of-the-box, and partly due to a customer relations fumble by CEO Eric Schmidt which resulted in the loss of much of the company’s installed base.
In 2003, to establish its open source cred, Novell went on a buying spree, which began in August when it spent an undisclosed amount to acquire Ximian, the open source company behind Evolution, Mono and Red Carpet, the later being an early attempt at an universal package manager for Linux, a precursor to Linspire’s Click & Run. In November, just three months later, Novell spent $210 million, partly financed by an investment from IBM, to purchase SUSE (then SuSE), which was at the time one of the top three Linux distros by most estimations.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
After two years of development, the stable version of the latest and greatest version of Bodhi Linux, 3.0.0, was released last month. There’s little doubt that loyal users breathed a sigh of relief with the release, as there had been some question about whether the distro would continue after project founder Jeff Hoogland briefly resigned in September, saying he no longer had the time required by his duties to the project. The good news was that he continued to work with the development team, and in January returned in his old role as lead developer. The long awaited new Bodhi was released less than a month later.
Click to enlargeLike many distros these days, Bodhi is built on top of a Ubuntu base, in this case using version 14.04 LTS as its core. However, Bodhi is anything but just another cookie cutter distro. From it’s inception back in 2010, the main purpose of the project has been to offer a Linux distribution that fully takes advantage of the lightweight but full featured and elegantly beautiful Enlightenment desktop environment. Beyond that, the Bodhi development team embraces a philosophy of minimalism — but not a forced minimalism which forces users into a confining or even crippling environment. A default installation of the distro is very bare bones, a base on which the user can build a system suited for his or her individual needs.
According to Hoogland, the new version of Bodhi is being well received, both by old users updating their systems and by new users giving the operating system a try for the first time.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Well, guess what? This sort of targeting is coming to your TV soon.
