I found this interesting article over at the KDE dot. Starting next week the Brazilian government is promoting a program to sell relatively cheap computers based on Linux (with KDE as the Desktop Environment.) They are hoping to sell over a half a million machines in the next 4 to 6 months. It looks as though Mandriva may be the base distribution. (24 month low interest loans are one way the idea is being promoted..)
Author: Avery
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Apple picking up windows converts from the iPod
If AppleInsider is right, Apple has won around 1 million converts from Windows based pc’s to Apple’s platform in the past year. In part the transition is credited to the success of the ipod, although the prevalence of viruses and other malware on the windows platform is another motivating factor.
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Open Source Clipart Library
I’m putting this under software for Windows and Linux, because this is something I’ve been asked about several times. What kind of clipart comes with OpenOffice.org or with Koffice. There are some samples usually, but clipart is one of those areas that has traditionally been hard to come by for free online. (Yes you could buy a collection of clipart.) Well, The open Clip art Library is filling that gap.
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Open Source Web templates
One of the things that I’ve really not looked at until lately is the use of open source web templates. I don’t know why but I’ve never really paid much attention to the thought of templates outside of those for a cms platform like wordpress or ezcontents, etc. However, recently I’ve started a site redesign for someone that wanted to use a template. So, an article on open source web design caught my attention.
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Spamassassin Custom Rulesets
I’m starting this post in part as a placeholder for some information I’ve come across. I’ve been tinkering with my first custom spamassassin rule. I’ve tried the SARE rulesets and they seem to be missing one specific class of junk mail in my setup. (After verifying that the rulesets were actually being used), I set about trying to create my own rule to deal with the offending messages.
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Sony’s DRM song sounding worse by the day
Well, let’s see…. I didn’t cover the original story since I was covered up with other work, but let me take a stab at starting from the beginning before I tell you how it’s gotten worse. It seems that SONY is concerned about piracy and computers being the tools of pirates (of course, everyone that uses a computer to listen to music is a pirate right?…) they came up with a clever way to put a stop to the piracy of their music. There would be a piece of software on every sony music cd that would install and run quietly in the background invisible EVEN TO WINDOWS that would prevent the inevitable. It would prevent the user from copying the disc and sending it out en masse.
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Ultimate Christmas gift for the tech that has everything (else), a satellite?
The story about the linux satellite that can be yours for a mere $10 million dollars caught my eye as I was skimming news this afternoon. Apparently a company called SpaceDev has launched the product called “SpaceDev Modular Microsat Busâ„¢”, which is a 220 pound satellite based on plug-n-play standard interfaces (ethernet, usb). It includes realtime linux as the OS, CORBA based object oriented control of subsystems and internet remote control.
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Windows patch week
It looks as though we can expect one critical update to Windows this week on the monthly patch cycle from Microsoft.
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Google Adsense changes
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I use Google adsense on these pages. Now obviously I can’t give statistics on how it does, but frankly what I’ve seen in the short time I’ve used it beats any other affiliate-type program I’ve used before. Yes, I’ve received checks from Amazon’s associates program before, but initially there you had to have a different account for each site, so I’ve got several dollars there in each of 8-10 different profiles left over from the “dark ages”…
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Linux network worm…
There is a linux network worm (virus) in the wild, which I’ve mentioned already in an earlier post. I did want to take a few moments to highlight this and dispell a few myths. (This is the first linux virus I recall seeing over at SARC in the last couple years….) Myth #1) linux doesn’t get viruses…. bull, this current worm is proof. Myth #2) if linux had bigger market share there would be tons of linux viruses – Maybe, but remember that much of the internet’s backbone runs on linux (all the machines at my providers webhosting company and indeed MANY others)