December 13, 2024
Keeping tech free
RTFM.
Anybody who’s played with computers outside of surfing, sending emails and doing some word processing has run across these initials at least once or twice. Put politely, they mean, “Read the manual.”
Sometimes the manual is of little use, however. Such was the case in a recent Zen Cart migration I undertook. However, even in cases where the manual is being ignored, it should still be read first. Before going off book, it helps to understand the process behind what you are doing.
Last week we learned that in the near future, browser plugins won’t automatically work out of the box in Chrome and Firefox. Instead of running automatically whenever a website calls for a plugin function, they’ll be “click to play,” meaning the user will have to give permission for the plugin to run with each instance. According to Google and Mozilla, this new rule will apply to each and every browser plugin in existence on the entire planet, save one. Flash will still run automatically, requiring no prompt from the user. With Flash, it’ll be business as usual.
This has the look and smell of a business play all the way through, although that might not be immediately evident when reading what ad giant Google and open source Mozilla have to say. At first glance, their reasoning makes sense. Flash is just too darn ubiquitous. It’s everywhere; buried in everything. Including Flash in “click to play” would put too much of a burden on the user.
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.
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:
Oddly, the death of the browser plugin started with Microsoft. Now, the other two major players in the browser game seem to be in the process of saying goodbye as well, although it’ll be a long goodbye evidently.
Everybody’s reporting on this. Earlier this week we heard that Google is in the process of doing away with the NPAPI architecture, a Netscape relic. They’re not throwing it out the window just yet; they’re just making it a damn nuisance to use. Brad Chacos at PCWorld put it this way:
I guess this is something of a cautionary tale.
The weekend before last we decided that it was time to update the WordPress installations on two of our five sites. Both sites had been using version 3.4.2 which was now a year old. Days earlier, WordPress had released 3.6.1, urging all users to update due to some serious security issues. Although it wasn’t clear that this affected the version we were using, we decided to go ahead and update. It was time.
That Friday night, in the wee hours of Saturday morning actually, I upgraded If This Be Treason, our less trafficked site. I began by checking all of the plugins to make sure they were good-to-go with WordPress’ latest and greatest and then updated all that had newer versions available. Except for one, all of the plugins used by that site indicated they worked with at least 3.6.0, which was good enough I figured, since 3.6.1 was only days old and was primarily a bugfix and security release, otherwise no different than the earlier point version.
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?
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.
So here you are with your new Debian system. Now you might be wondering, “Which programs do I use?”
First you might want to get the “minimize, maximize and close” windows-buttons which aren’t default in Debian 7–only the close window-button is there. From the desktop go to Activities menu to the top left and select Programs >System Tools and the “dconf-editor.” There are a lot of menus here to open so look carefully. Click Org >Gnome >Shell >Overrides. To your left you’ll find the “button layout” row. Type “:minimize,maximize,close” without quotation marks and then hit enter.
When it comes to Oracle as caretaker of FOSS projects, users are voting with their feet.
The company that already very quickly lost control of OpenOffice when most of the project’s developers bolted, formed the Document Foundation and forked the code to create LibreOffice, is now in danger of losing another open source jewel it inherited when it took over Sun. LibreOffice, as you know, is now the defacto office suite of choice among Linux users and is rapidly gaining traction in the Windows world as well. OpenOffice is pretty much only a memory.
Of course, no one ever expected Oracle to be a good open source caretaker.
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.
