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.

When we first started to explore the possibility of moving to open source in 2007, I looked into a number of possible open source support companies and settled on working with Senokian Solutions Ltd, who have been very good for us.  Unfortunately Senokian Solutions Ltd have now ceased trading, and their entrepreneurial MD Jake Stride has moved onto other areas of open source software development with their Tactile CRM product (which I use – its good).  A new company, Senokian Internet Ltd look over our support contract but this business has recently been sold on to a highly capable web hosting company who have agreed to support us as well as they can, but do no

Most readers of this humble blog will be very aware of my personal opinion about Mono and specifically with regards to where it should belong in Ubuntu.

Free and Open Source Software projects are built using a wide variety of programming languages. Blackduck who study this kind of thing have released some interesting data regarding the use of various languages to develop FOSS applications.

C# (the language of choice for Mono advocates) is languishing in 10th place behind Perl, Python, PHP, Java and many not insignificant others.

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:

The concept of taking older and redundant windows PCs, triageing them, clean installing linux and passing the machines onto good homes is an excellent one, and cuts out an awful lot of legal problems.  Its being done in the USA and I wonder when it will happen in the uk?

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.

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:

We are recruiting a new member to our team and they have asked for a blackberry as their email device of choice, something we have never used before in house.  Having looked into this, it seems like a real can of worms.

We have been longstanding customers of Nildram broadband, and recently upgraded one of our lines to the latest generation of high upload speed line offering upto 16mb down / 2.5mb up using annex m. Anyone considering this service may be interested in these results:
EXISTING NETGEAR DG834 v4 ROUTER (allegedly not annex m compatible but still works fine with 5.01.09 firmware):
connection speed 14.64 mb down / 1.17mb up
3 x speedtest.net results:
1) 10.61 / 0.62
2) 10.80 / 0.65
3) 11.24 / 0.73

I am a huge fan of the firefox update scanner as previously blogged, in that it saves me a lot of time (and hurts when its not there!