FLOSS News

I just read this excellent review of the Windows 7 Professional [sic] edition by Ramon Cahenzli. It’s really well written, especially as I assume English is not his native language, detailed, funny and very poignant.

I wish I’d written it. But then that would mean I’d have to buy Windows which isn’t something I really want or need to do.

Here’s a couple of quotes but do go and read it when you have a few minutes spare. You’ll remember why we use Ubuntu and other Free and Open Source software.

You may recall the now infamous “open letter” [link] to Lance from the CentOS community back at the end of July.

You seem to have crawled into a hole … and this is not acceptable.

At the time it seemed rather coincidental as we were having difficulty trying to get hold of the company we originally used to register several of our domains… Guess who’s the owner/manager of UKlinux.net? Yep. Lance Davis.

We have asked repeatedly for information from them/him but are being met with silence.

With the recent news of Microsoft being told to stop selling MS Word in the US due to it’s infringement of a patent owned by i4i I am really hopeful that perhaps, just perhaps, someone will start to realise just how MAD this all is.

Packt has launched its Fourth Annual Open Source CMS Award.

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) that have been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to our website. At the moment, we’re accepting nominations for CMSes across different categories on the Award. Nominations will remain open till September 11, after which, the top 5 nominations for each category will go through to the final stage where people and our judges will vote to choose the best CMS in each category.

I wonder…

Since I wrote about getting the Windows license fee refunded on my Asus 1008HA netbook here in the UK, there have been more examples where individuals have had some success.

First we had a story on slashdot in the USA that seemed to be inspired by my own:

It seems, unfortunately, as though my experience with Amazon was not common place.

Neil Wilson left a comment this morning explaining that his request to Amazon did not meet with the same response as my own…

We are not in a position to offer a partial refund for this product. You can of course return the laptop to us for a full refund if you wish

On the 21st July 2009 I reported how Amazon had made it really easy for me to reclaim the cost of the Windows XP license on a new Asus netbook. This was a very popular post for my humble blog; especially after appearing on Slashdot thanks to reader and Digital Tipping Point producer Christian Einfeldt.

Yesterday I received a great prize from the people at Miserware for helping with the Beta trial of their power saving software for Linux computers; a new and very shiny Asus 1008HA netbook PC.

Last night in bed I was reading some more of a novel (Not Novell) called “The suspicions of Mr Whicher“. It’s an interesting book, based on a true story about infanticide in the middle 1800s and one of our very first real “detectives”. But I am finding it a bit on the “dry” side truth be told…

Anyway, about 1/2 way through the book I discovered something amazing. A reference to a psychological condition called:

Wow!

Get this, there’s a new web site that looks to have been built using the Open Source Drupal CMS (At least the blog portion did when I looked at the XHTML) as the front-end which lets anyone see a “dashboard” of spending on Government IT projects:

It has been an exciting time since we launched the IT Dashboard. There have been more than 20 million hits so far…

20 Million hits? I hadn’t heard about this. Had you? It gets even better.

For anybody just joining us, the “IT Dashboard” is a new, one-stop clearing house of information that allows anyone with a web browser to track … IT initiatives and hold the government accountable for progress and results.

Back in 1995 something very odd happened. Microsoft released a new version of their operating system, jumping from version 3.x to version 95 which, as well as being a pretty innovative bit of version numbering, brought in a few other new things including the start menu. Now to get the start menu to work they pulled off an astonishing move and added a new key to computer keyboards, not just keyboards made by Microsoft (I am not even sure they did make them at the time) but keyboards made by all manufacturers. This key had a little windows advert on it and was called the Windows key.

This could be pretty big.

Google announced, in their own rather subtle way – via a blog post – their new Google Chrome OS. It’s quite exciting simply because it is from Google and what the objective of the OS is:

My favourite music player has just been updated and version 1.2 released.

I picked up the story from The H where they’ve done a great job of describing most of the new features in a single paragraph.

Die6 T-Shirt

The postman dutifully did his ‘thang’ today and dropped off some letters. One was a small package that needed to be signed for and it was addressed to me

Was it an early Father’s Day present? No. I was expecting something as it happens.

This is really quite interesting. It seems as though the UK government are starting, finally, to get the whole “Commons” thing.

There is this Government Department/Quango(?) called the Office of Public Sector Information (OSPI for short). Yep, I’ve never heard of them either. Not until I saw this tweet from Glyn Moody last night at any rate. The OSPI’s remit is (according to their website) as follows: