March 10, 2025
Keeping tech free
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.
Adobe hacked
We’ve known for years that Adobe doesn’t seem to have a knack for keeping their products secure. New vulnerabilities are found almost daily in Reader and Flash, so much so that Windows users grow used to the constant updates required of them by the fine folks at Adobe. Now it appears as if the San Jose based company can’t keep their servers secure either.
Last Friday, The Australian reported that black hats had managed to steal source code and sensitive customer information:
Earlier this week at the Gartner Symposium ITXpo in Orlando, Microsoft’s lame duck President, Steve Ballmer, once again restated his vision for “One Microsoft/one world.”
Actually, we jest. As reported by Larry Dignan on CNET, the vision remains a single Windows GUI to be used across all devices, from smartphone to tablet to PC. That’s what he and the rest of the crowd in Redmond have been saying since long before the release of Windows 8, when Metro was still Metro, which was their first attempt at implementing this one-size-fits-all vision. Nevermind that it hasn’t worked for them so far. You know what they say about “try, try, try and try again?”
Alien Pastures, the blog of Eric Hameleers, otherwise known as AlienBOB, returned to functioning status yesterday after being unavailable for about five days. The blog,…
The story behind All Things Open (ATO) is IT-oLogy, the nonprofit behind the conference coming to Raleigh later this month. This occurred to me last week as I was preparing for the event, on a night when I’d decided I knew as much as I wanted to know for the moment about the speakers and their workshops and started to look into IT-oLogy.
Over the past few years Ubuntu has become somewhat divided from the rest of the Linux community and it could easily be renamed “Linux Marmite,” as you either love it or hate it.
A number of reasons are often cited for disliking Ubuntu. Top of the list seems to be Unity. I maintain that Unity is a really good desktop environment. I spent some time working with it and I find it incredibly intuitive but my view of Unity is in the minority. I think that people coming to Linux for the first time and choosing Ubuntu as their distribution of choice will probably not be as put off by the experience as users that were brought up on Gnome 2.
Browsers, Business, Internet, News and Social Networks
Things aren’t going well for Matt Kruse, the developer of the über-popular Social Fixer browser extension which gives users control over how their Facebook pages and news feeds appear to them. It works within the browser and doesn’t affect the experience of anyone on Facebook other than the user. With it, status updates can be tabbed, items can be filtered, and it allows hiding or blocking sponsored stories and other advertising that runs through the news feed.
The last we heard, about three weeks ago, Zuckerberg’s people had taken down Social Fixer‘s popular Facebook page, a place for users to testify for the app and seek help and for Mr. Kruse to make announcements about updates and so forth. FB was claiming it removed the page due to reports of spamming, but was offering no way for him to plead his case.
Google wants to do away with Flash?
The day after our own Christine Hall expressed the opinion that Adobe’s Flash “isn’t going to go away anytime soon,” mainly because the Google ad business is hooked on it, we find that the Mountain View company might very well be trying to push Flash out the door. On Tuesday, CNET reported that Google has released a free beta of Google Web Designer, a tool for building animated HTML 5 ads.
We’re flabbergasted.
Usually when we run a poll we’re not surprised by the answers. We’re certainly surprised by these results, however.
A month ago, on September 2nd to be exact, we asked you, “Does GNU/Linux offer too many choices? Are there too many Linux distros?” As answers we offered the numbers one through five with one meaning way too many, five meaning way too few and three meaning just about right. As we expected, number three received the most votes, but not by a large margin.
Microsoft is trying to get a grip.
They’re not in a tailspin, nothing like it, not yet anyway, but they haven’t had a vision since the release of Windows 95. They’ve had success that wasn’t visionary, the Xbox comes to mind, but that was a calculated move for market share, not a vision for the company’s future. They also helped pioneer the tablet, Bill Gates personal vision around the turn of the millennium, but they couldn’t figure out how to implement it.
We’ve seen this crisis coming since the introduction of Vista, which should have been a shining moment for the company. After all, the operating system was nearly six years in the making. They botched it, releasing a much anticipated OS that was not only a resource hog but basically just didn’t work. Wow. This was just after the release of Zune, a “me too” iPod, and before the release of the Kin phones, which are so rare that they probably fetch a premium on eBay.
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.
