This year IT-oLogy, the organization behind the annual POSSCON conference in Columbia, South Carolina, cancelled the event in order to focus on launching the Great Wide Open (GWO) conference in Atlanta. At the time, some expressed fear that this might signal the end of the Palmetto State event, that Great Wide Open actually meant a move and new name for the conference. At the same time, others were speculating that GWO would be a one-off event, essentially making it a one year move by POSSCON to Atlanta, which would then return to its native home in Columbia, which is where IT-oLogy is headquartered.
FOSS Force
FOSS Week in Review
With another week coming to an end, let’s wrap it up on a somewhat balanced note.
Get out the Vote: Our friends at Red Hat are now taking votes for the Women in Open Source Awards. The first award of its kind, the prize shines a spotlight on women making important contributions to an open source project, to the open source community, or through the use of open source methodology.
Nominations are open through Nov. 21. Qualified judges from Red Hat will narrow down the nominees to a subset of finalists for both the Academic and Community awards. The public will vote to determine the winner from the finalists selected. Winners will be announced in June during an awards ceremony at next year’s Red Hat Summit in Boston.
It should come as little surprise to most that Reglue is just about our favorite nonprofit Linux project. This would be true even if the organization’s founder and executive director wasn’t also our own fun-to-read columnist, Ken Starks. After all, what’s not to like about an organization that collects old, worn Windows boxes, fixes them up until they’re practically new again, and finds them homes with school kids who otherwise wouldn’t have a computer? Along the way, those Windows machines become Linux machines, which helps break the vendor lock-in which Redmond tries to create in the minds of American school children.
Monday’s article on easy Netflix coming at last to Linux garnered a few polite responses, taking me to task for my enthusiasm for a “non-free” solution. The problems are that Netflix uses DRM and that currently its use on GNU/Linux requires the use of the proprietary Chrome browser. One commenter even questioned FOSS Force’s commitment to software freedom with the remark: “Your logo “Keeping Tech Free” I take it that means free beer and not freedom.”
Nope. I’m an advocate of free “as in speech” software — which includes the freedom to choose. If there’s a FOSS solution for something I need or want to do, I’ll take that every time, and encourage my friends to do so as well. However, if there’s something I need or want to do with no FOSS solution available, I might use a proprietary solution, depending on the depth of my need or want and on how draconian the terms of the proprietary EULA.
As of today, Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil has been detained by the Syrian government for 943 days. For those of you who may not be aware…
We knew it was coming several months ago. At first, just from flimsy rumors, but then mention of the free Time Warner speed upgrade began showing up on credible news sites. Credible enough for me to call Time Warner and find out where these upgrades would take place. When I found out that our small town of Taylor, Texas was included in the upgrade area, I became separated by only 3 degrees from Happy Dance.
When my euphoria dropped to a more manageable level, I took some time to mull it over. Specifically, I was asking myself why Time Warner would include small towns almost fifty miles away from the city in this upgrade? I mean…gifts, horses, mouths and all that. I thought it was a legitimate question.
I wasn’t able to make any sense of it until someone ‘splained it to me.
Linux’s got Netflix. No fuss, no muss, easy-peasy Netflix, straight out-of-the-box.
It wasn’t so long ago that common knowledge dictated that the reason GNU/Linux wasn’t getting traction was software, namely MS Office and Photoshop. Those days are long gone. Office is now pretty much irrevelant, with many if not most home users (at least the people I know) opting for Open Office or LibreOffice. Meanwhile, Photoshop’s moved to the cloud and although it still won’t work on Linux, many graphic artists are finding that GIMP is robust enough to tackle nearly everything thrown at it.
So that should be it, right? Wrong.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), a paradigm shift in home computing has occurred during the past seven years. These days, computers are as much about entertainment as they are about word processing, spreadsheets and the like. At the center of the computer-as-entertainment-device revolution is our favorite old DVD rental company Netflix, which offers more streaming moving image titles that you can shake a stick at — if shaking sticks at movie titles happens to be your thing — with unlimited streaming costing as little as eight bucks a month.
The week after next the FOSS world will be brimming with opportunities to find out more about what’s going on in three separate shows around the country. If you are within a day’s drive of any of them — or if you are not adverse to flying — making it to one of them would be well worth the effort.
In the South, there’s All Things Open, which is being held midweek — Oct. 22-23 — in Raleigh, N.C. ATO is a conference exploring open source, open tech and the open web in the enterprise. Featuring 90 speakers and 100 sessions, ATO brings a lot of heavy hitters to the Research Triangle area. The price for admission might be considered steep by regular Linux show denizens — ranging from $25 for the Women in Tech/OS panel presentation to $229 for a two-day pass. Those who wish to check out the menu of options can go to the ATO registration page.
Sometime overnight, the Hello World educational video project, which has been trying to raise a little money through an Indiegogo campaign, reached its goal — with twelve full days still to go in the campaign. The funds will be used to purchase new equipment.
As of 11 a.m. EDT, the organization’s Indiegogo webpage is showing that it’s so far received donations totaling $2,145, nearly $100 over the goal of $2,048. The organization had chosen to take an “in for a penny, in for a pound” approach to this fundraising effort by choosing the “fixed funding” option. This means that if the goal hadn’t been met, no funds would be received and all donations would be returned to the contributors.
From its inception, we knew the Internet to be an unsafe place. Before the first server was cracked by an online hacker, we knew that was bound to happen sooner or later. We knew because people were already breaking into computers, even without the Internet offering 24/7 cracker/hacker convenience.
Back in the early 90s, when I was living in the college town of Chapel Hill, I shelled-out five bucks or so at the local Egghead Software store for a shrink wrapped floppy disk loaded with “shareware” utilities for MS-DOS. Twenty years have passed, so I don’t remember what tool I needed, but I’d gone there specifically looking for something or another and had been directed to that particular product by a clerk at the store. Once I got home, I stuck the disk into the drive, looked over its contents and installed a couple of the apps.
That was the end of it, or so I thought.
Several months later a biology major friend of mine with no computer skills — yes, in those days it was possible to earn an undergraduate science degree without knowing how to use a computer — dropped by to use my computer, a 486 with a whopping 4 megs of RAM. She was set to graduate soon and needed to use my machine to prepare a resume. I opened WordPerfect and set her loose to type away, answering any questions she had as she worked — such as how to remove a formatting code or preview how the document would look when printed.
An hour or so later, when she finished, I saved her work to a new blank floppy and sent her to see our mutual friend, Tony, to print it, as all I had was an old, noisy and beat-up Epson dot matrix printer and he had a fancy daisy wheel job. Two days later, she was back at my door, mad as hell.