The Heart of Linux How a nonbeliever discovered that there is a Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy and a Linux community. Well…he discovered the…
FOSS Force
What started off as a quest to evaluate FOSS money management apps ended up revealing an issue with PayPal that plagues even highly funded proprietary money management programs running on that other operating system.
This is both a review and a complaint, which often seems to go hand in hand in the tech world.
I’ve been looking for a financial management app recently. Since I closed a bricks and mortar store back in 2012 — after eight years it became yet another victim of the 2007 recession — I’ve been letting my business and personal bank accounts, along with my PayPal account, sort themselves out separately. Business has improved a bit recently, and the time has come to once again put all of my accounting eggs in the same basket, so to speak.
My plan was supposed to be easy, but you know what they say about well laid plans.
FOSS Week in Review
Also, eight new distro releases, CoreOS raises another $28 million, Mint drops codecs and the women of open source.
The most reported FOSS story this week was the beginning of the court fight instigated by Oracle against Google over Android’s Java implementation. Most interesting as the proceedings get going are the once familiar names that are now back in the news.
So far, we’ve heard from Jonathan Schwartz, pretty much a good guy who you might remember replaced Scott McNealy as CEO at Sun Microsystems in April 2006 and was on hand to pass the keys of the kingdom on to Oracle in 2010 after the company was brought down by the so-called Great Recession.
The Video Screening Room
If you’re like us, your eyes glaze over whenever the subject of big data or Hadoop comes up. Watch this video and you’ll be able to join the conversation the next time the subject is broached.
When you’re talking big data analysis, you’re almost always talking open source. Apache Hadoop is what often comes to mind as a valuable big data analysis tool. But do you know the advantages that Apache Spark has to offer? This May 5 presentation from IBM’s Government Analytics Forum in Washington, DC does a nice job of explaining the advantages.
Numbers supplied by Opera show that the browser’s new Power Saving Mode, currently found only in developer builds, can considerably extend laptop battery life.
The folks behind the free but proprietary Opera browser announced today that the latest developer build includes Power Saving Mode, a new feature that the company claims can extend battery life by up to 50 percent. If true, this could be a serious game changer. Free and open source software advocates should hope that the developers at Mozilla are paying attention.
Mozilla seeks user feedback with a new project that gives users a chance to take planned features for a test flight.
On Tuesday Mozilla announced a new program for Firefox that allows users to try features that are in the works but not yet ready for prime time. The news of the new program, called Test Pilot, came by way of a Mozilla Blog post by Nick Nguyen, the organization’s vice president of Firefox product. He said that the program will not only allow users an early look at yet to be implemented planned features, but will give Firefox’s developers a chance to get feedback from the community.
“When building features for hundreds of millions of Firefox users worldwide, it’s important to get them right,” he wrote. “To help figure out which features should ship and how they should work, we created the new Test Pilot program.”
The Raspberry Pi Report
Covered in this report: The Pi gets new cameras, another U.S. Picademy, monitoring health conditions with MedPi and the AstroPi in low Earth orbit.
Quite a lot has happened in the Raspberry Pi world since my last article. From new hardware to Picademy, the past couple of weeks have been great, filled with news story after great news story. The month of April ended on a high note, with the release of Ubuntu MATE 16.04 for the Pi, and the month of May looks to keep carrying that trend. I realize how hard it is to keep up with the all the Raspberry Pi news, so here are what I consider to be some of the high points.
Breaking News: Patched versions of ImageMagick now available.
FOSS Force has now learned that the ImageTragick hole has been patched in versions 7.0.1-2 and 6.9.4-0. Websites using ImageMagick are urged to upgrade.
Security researchers are reporting that cracker/hackers are currently taking advantage of ImageTragick, the easy to exploit security vulnerability in ImageMagick, a popular open source image manipulation tool used by many websites. However, so far the attacks don’t appear to be widespread.
The Video Screening Room As you might expect for someone who is constantly surrounded by bankers, Don Duet uses the term “intellectual property” a lot…
The Heart of Linux
Is disk partitioning a stumbling block to the new user installing Linux for the first time?
I remember it clearly. Well, as clearly as my teen-year chemically fueled indiscretions will allow. It was directly after the 2.27 kernel was released. Almost overnight, it went from “wireless sucks in Linux” to “holy crap, wireless works in Linux.” Yeah, there are still holdouts — I don’t want to mention any names but their first initial is Broadcom — and they still suck.
Desktop Linux has made some amazing strides in the past decade. Heck, it’s made huge strides in the past two years.
However, for those of us who use and advocate the use of desktop Linux to new users, there’s a but. A big ol’ in-your-face-can’t-sweep-it-under-the-rug “but.” Regardless of how smoothly your explanation of installing and using desktop Linux goes, that big ol’ but steps in your way. That pesky, clumsy pause as you try to figure out how to tell a new user how to partition a drive.