These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of April, 2014. 1. What Would You Do to Improve Linux? by…
Posts published in “Site News”
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of March, 2014. 1. Linux for Seniors 101 by Ken Starks. Published…
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of February, 2014.
1. Recommending Linux to a Friend by Ken Starks. Published February 21, 2014. Our Mr. Starks explains how he got one nothing-but-Windows user to try and like Linux.
2. Maintenance–The Achilles Heel of Linux by Ken Starks. Published January 30, 2014. Should Linux users fight back again “broken” aspects of their favorite distro because “that’s just the way it is?”
3. KDE Tops Desktop Poll by Christine Hall. February 12, 2014. Visitors to FOSS Force choose KDE as their favorite desktop.
Yesterday afternoon about one o’clock eastern time, we began a migration to a new server. You weren’t supposed to notice the change. Or, if you did, it’d be like, “Wow! Look at how much better this site performs now!” We had it planned so visitors would just connect to our old server until the DNS change propagated the Internet and — voila! — they’d suddenly be visiting us on our new and improved server, without even knowing.
It sounds like a plan, eh? That’s what we thought, until it didn’t work out.
These are the top ten most read articles on FOSS Force during the month of January: 1. Firefox OS: The Return of Microsoft’s Netscape Fears…
It only makes sense that the NSA be confronted online. After all, it’s the Internet the agency uses to spy on us. They’re not following us down dark streets or steaming open our snail mail. Instead, they’re monitoring our emails to discover who is in our circle and stalking us on Facebook and Google Plus. Especially if we use Windows, there’s no need for them to dirty their hands sifting through our garbage when they can enter through a virtual trap door on our computer to rifle through our word processor and spreadsheet files. Phone tapping? How old school in a world where every call we make, even from a land line, becomes VoIP somewhere along the line. When we use VoIP or Skype, they can easily listen. If we visit a website located in a country on their hit list, they sit-up and take notice.
The people at the NSA don’t care about our right to liberty, happiness or even life itself. They are obsessed with what they see as their mission and are convinced, as zealots are always convinced, that the ends justify the means. They embody the worst of Stalin, Mussolini, Franco and Pol Pot. They do so with an American twist, maintaining an illusion of freedom which keeps us pacified.
February 11th will be The Day We Fight Back.
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
FOSS Week in Review
In 2013, Linux hits grand slam
Now that companies are closing-out their books on the old year, it’s becoming evident that Linux devices were a big hit in 2013.
On Friday, CNET’s Brooke Crothers reported that Chromebooks, those nifty laptops running Google’s Chrome OS that let the cloud do the heavy lifting, accounted for 21% of all laptop sales last year. As impressive as that may be, the numbers get even better when Android tablets are added to the mix. According to market research company NPD Group, January to November saw 1.76 million Chromebooks and Android tablets sold, up from only 400,000 during all of 2012.
The OEMs, of course, are paying attention and are readying new Linux devices for the market.
What were the ten best stories we published on FOSS Force this year? Well, that would depend on a lot of things, wouldn’t it, such as who’s asking? We could tell you what we think our ten best stories were this year, but we’ll hold that until next week. Today we’re going to look at the ten stories that got the most reads on our site this year.
The All Things Open conference is this Wednesday and Thursday and I’m looking forward to being there.
Although Raleigh, where the conference is happening, is only an hour and a half from my home, I haven’t been there since the mid-nineties. That would’ve been back when I was living and hanging-out in Chapel Hill, the southwestern point of the region called the Triangle which includes Raleigh and Durham as it’s other two points. Chapel Hill is an über cool blend of students from the University of North Carolina and old hippie-leftie types–perfect for an old devotee of Leary and Ram Dass like myself. Alas, as much as I’d like, I won’t have time nor money to visit my old stomping grounds. I’ll be in the area to work and get back home. No playing or partying will be on the agenda for this trip. Oh well…
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
You can be certain of one thing; if you’re a penguinista I’ll have your back at the All Things Open conference. I’ll be paying attention. Plenty of good companies and organizations will be represented at the the conference, to be held next week in Raleigh, but it is an enterprise conference so there will be a few snakes slithering about.
Mainly I’m talking about Oracle and Microsoft.
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
When IT-oLogy opens the doors to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh on October 23, the focus will be on open source in the enterprise. That’s only fitting, given the fact that Raleigh is Red Hat’s playground–and Red Hat practically wrote the book on enterprise level open source.
Every hour during the two day conference there will be six lectures or workshops with at least four of them tailored especially for the business IT crowd. There’ll be tech-centric workshops on Python, databases, big data, Github, PHP and more. Not being a developer or admin type, I can only imagine what all of this might mean to the serious IT department types as they peruse the All Things Open schedule.
So where does that leave the rest of us who work with FOSS everyday without getting our knuckles dirty writing code, building and tweaking networks or figuring out new and better ways to make big bucks with computer technology? Is there anything at All Things Open for those of us who think the word “code” must always be preceded by “morse” or that “enterprise” refers to a Federation star ship laden with photon torpedoes?
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