July 21, 2025
Keeping tech free
Mozilla wants to shed itself of Thunderbird, its popular cross platform email client. Although widely used on GNU/Linux, OS X and on Windows, the organization now seems to pretty much view it as a liability.
According to Mozilla executive chairperson Mitchell Baker in a company-wide memo written Monday and widely published online, the Thunderbird project is now seen as a “tax” by Mozilla because it distracts and takes time away from the organization’s software engineers.
Every month it seems like the Raspberry Pi Foundation keeps wowing us, and this November was no exception. As a matter-of-fact, this past month was jam packed with headlines, so much so that I’m eagerly waiting to see what the month of December will offer. Since there was so much that happened, here is a recap of the biggest stories that headlined the Raspberry Pi for the month of November.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Let’s talk about the future, as understood by today’s children who will ultimately shape that future.
In the course of a normal day, for every adult with whom I speak, there are two kids who add to the day’s conversations. Sometimes they are 17 year’s old, sometimes they are anywhere from 9-12. Regardless of the “sometimes,” one thing remains a constant: These kids will shape the world in which they live, equaling and surpassing the accomplishments of their fathers or even their grandfathers, those fearful but heroic men who faced withering gunfire and certain death on foreign beaches, men who prematurely ended the Third Reich to insure those after them would not have to, and men who died so those approaching the land could advance.
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of November, 2015.
1. The Devil & BSD: Leaving Linux Behind by Larry Cafiero. Published November 23, 2015. Mr. Cafiero takes a stand and makes a statement by wiping Linux from his go-to laptop in favor of PC-BSD.
2. System Requirements: When Is ‘Enough’ Enough? by Ken Starks. Published November 10, 2015. Do you have a computer that still runs great, but you can’t install anything on it because it doesn’t meet modern “system requirements”? Well, our Mr. Starks says that enough might be enough.
The popular website Tux Machines has evidently fallen victim to a DDOS attack that made the site unavailable for part of the day on Friday. The announcement of the attack was initially made in a blog notice posted on the site late Friday morning GMT which opened with the line “Tux Machines has been mostly offline this morning.”
Phoenix based Symple PC, which offered refurbished “web workstations” running Ubuntu for $89, has evidently ridden off into the night of no return. Since at least August 24, the company’s website has said the product is “No Longer Availabe,” although the website remains operational. Numerous attempts to contact the company for clarification have gone unanswered.
The venture was the brainchild of Jason Spisak, whose history with Linux and FOSS goes back to being the co-founder and marketing director Lycoris, which made news in 2003 when Walmart offered the Linux distro preinstalled on $199 PCs. FOSS Force first told you about the Symple PC back in March, not long after the company’s official launch.
The Thanksgiving holiday really put a damper on FOSS developments this week — but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to report. On the contrary. So without further adieu, and on the heels of Thanksgiving, help yourself to another slice of…
Pi Zero for $5: Our friends at Phoronix reported this week about the Pi Zero, the latest Raspberry Pi board, costing a grand total of $5 American.
You might be excused for thinking that every tech company is out to get you, especially if you still use Windows, which we like to think of as “yesterday’s operating system.”
We’ll start with the poor Windows user.
News came out on Tuesday that since August Dell computers have been coming out-of-the-box with a root certificate preinstalled that is an “unintended security vulnerability.” The source of the quote, by the way, is Dell itself.
The Steam machine is now publicly on sale as of last week, but it’s not off to the best start. A couple of weeks ago, Ars Technica compared the performance of games when running on Valve’s Linux based SteamOS and Windows 10. Six Valve games were tested on a single machine and results showed a 21 to 58 percent frame rate drop when running on Linux. While only six games were tested out of an entire collection of around 1,800 available titles, the games used Valve’s own Source engine, which is designed for Linux and SteamOS. Valve had previously stated that Steam games run faster on Linux, so it was expected that any of Valve’s own Source engine games would run smoothly.
On February 28th, 2012 at approximately 5:30 p.m., an emergency room ear, nose, throat doctor (ENT) who treated me for difficulty in breathing gathered my family around him. He reported that the throat cancer he found while inserting a trach tube was at stage 4 and that my prognosis was terminal. They were informed that the only thing they could do was to take me home and make me “comfortable.”
I don’t remember much. Diane, my youngest daughter Amanda, my ex-wife and others were at my bedside. I was heavily sedated and could barely speak. It was a carousel of faces and nurses, all in their own way, trying to bring me comfort. However, my life partner Diane wasn’t having any of the take-me-home-and-make-me-comfortable thing. She would have none of that. She demanded that an oncologist see me.
