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Excellent point... especially when you consider that if you *are* distributing it will pass through your commercial department.

I have been doing commercial work lately on over 100 contracts, each with unique terms and conditions. Even if we had projects running that used every single OSS license out there it wouldn't tax us to an unreasonable level. That is kind of what specialists are for... businesses pay programmers to programme, and the commercial department to read contracts.

The best bit is that unlike technical issues your PHB probably appreciates the importance of contracts! I can't think of a single director (even the engineering directors) where I work who couldn't assimilate the GPL in five minutes or less - and the GPL is one of the more complex licenses. They deal with stuff far more weird than this every day.

All you need is to know how to state the benefits in their language. My humble effort is here - and I would welcome additions.

You can run Yahoo Java games on Linux PPC using the IBM JRE. I wrote a set of installation instructions for it that cover installation and setting up the Firefox plugin.

The installation isn't Grandma level, but once it is up and running it is no different to Yahoo games on Windows.

Your kids are going to have (at least) two people who are a) their history b) documented better than ever before.

Their kids will have an amazing amount of data from 6 people. 10 generations in there will be a huge mass of mundane details for 2046 people just in their own family tree.

Hopefully someone will invent a better search engine because otherwise it's going to be impossible for them to find the interesting things without being overwhelmed by a tidal wave of rubbish blog posts and bad photos posted to flickr. There is one obvious solution of course...

The perception that open source software is not business friendly is a common, but mistaken, one. I have recently been trying to write a five minute, commercial biased presentation in order to help correct that.

It's fairly vital that commercial and legal are involved in selecting acceptable component licenses. To that end I have tried to lay out the key points in commercial language to make it easier for engineering to gain mindshare and buy in while synergistically buzzwording the proactive antelope.

There are some really bad applications out there - one of the worst is superkaramba because it's easy to load the CPU heavily if you don't manage the timers properly.

A couple of very small changes to themes can cut CPU use from 30% to 1% (with pic).

Based on that kind of thing it wouldn't surprise me if real gains were possible in battery life - at the very least for applications with user generated modifications and plugins. The more unpopular Firefox plugins are certainly notorious for lack of QA.

I remain convinced that part of the reason that Microsoft is attempting to push it's own alternative to Flash is because Linux support is finally decent.

Not only is there the binary client but some of the free alternatives can now handle YouTube. Development was getting a little closer to cross platform content and entertainment that the internet promised rather than the platform locking that was looking likely at one point.

Anyway I installed swfdec today on a PPC machine and documented the steps. The results are very good for an application in such an early stage of development. While you might think the internet *with* Flash is annoying, you try living without it for a while and see how much the Firefox "you need more plugins to view this page" bar bugs you.

MOL is a true work of genius. Even on pretty old PPC hardware it functions with almost no slowdown. (Linux host, OS X and Linux clients). Compared to contemporaries it had no equal - the current generation of products on x86 are just starting to catch up. I'm most impressed with the way my powerbook can sleep (close the lid) under Linux and all of the hosted sessions quietly pause themselves with no problems. They even resume a network connection perfectly on waking up.

It'm glad to see similar happening on x86, finally, as it's one of the things that really made PPC based machines special. (There is some documentation for MOL and Kubuntu here.)

A while a go I posted my list of things that I didn't like about OSX and I got some good responses that fixed a few.

The good news (for me) is that now Linux on powerbooks is very, very good - not only do all the key things like wireless (with WPA), suspend, sound, 3d acceleration etc work perfectly but with Beryl installed it actually looks far better than OS X. I was sitting in an internet cafe yesterday and people were being awed by OS X... except it wasn't OS X at all. I said almost two years ago that Linux was catching up with OS X for look and feel... well, now it has. Even with Gnome apps mixed into a KDE desktop the behavior (thanks to an awful lot of work by the Kubuntu/Ubuntu guys) is more consistant across applications than anything you will find on OS X or Windows.

Oh, and with MOL installed (so it's one button press to switch to/from full screen OS X almost as fast as on native hardware) there really are no downsides.

These instructions may be easier. The good news is that you only have to do the part marked "hardware installation". Once that is done normal WEP and open networks will work with the wifi-radar GUI package to find and connect to them. No rebooting is required at any stage of getting WiFi to work or finding new networks (WPA or WEP or Open) :)

If you post the particular problems you are having as comments to my article (this one) then I'll see if I can help.

Here you go: Setting up an Airport Extreme Card with Kubuntu Edgy and WPA.

Going from 6.06 to 6.10 was pretty messy on PowerPC (not that I Was surprised - it's a small platform that doesn't get as much QA work) and it did require a complete reinstall. Qtparted seemed to be the source of about 90% of the problems.

On the other hand I was *really* pleased when it was installed. The fresh install was trivially easy and everything works - including wireless with WPA and 3D acceleration. It's about the first time my laptop has been 100% usable as a laptop since I dumped OS X.

So: Minus one point for not upgrading properly. Plus several hundred points for maturity of hardware support. I'm sure that for 7.04 upgrades will be running perfectly :)

Especially integration with things like GPG for automatically authenticating posts in web forms and web mail. Has anyone found an extension to do that? There's a encryption plugin for gmail I believe but no general extension for all web forms.

It could seriously kick off use of GPG amongst the non-geeks for authentication (mostly) and encryption (past a critical mass). I don't believe it would be that difficult to explain to normal IT literate (ie, already uses Firefox or Opera) the benefit of signatures in evading blame and establishing trust.

Semi-on-topic, on the security front Firefox 2 fixes the bug with tab icon handling that allows fingerprinting of Firefox 1.5 by tracking isolated .ico file requests.

Especially integration with things like GPG for automatically authenticating posts in web forms and web mail. Has anyone found an extension to do that? There's a encryption plugin for gmail I believe but no general extension for all web forms.

It could seriously kick off use of GPG amongst the non-geeks for authentication (mostly) and encryption (past a critical mass). I don't believe it would be that difficult to explain to normal IT literate (ie, already uses Firefox or Opera) the benefit of signatures in evading blame and establishing trust.

Semi-on-topic, on the security front Firefox 2 fixes the bug with tab icon handling that allows fingerprinting of Firefox 1.5 by tracking isolated .ico file requests.

One of the good things about youtube is that they have stuck with Flash 7, so at least Linux users *can* watch the videos. Still, it would be nice to see an open format option - and Google Video does offer some other formats.

At least if they move to Flash 9 it works on Linux by either running IE6 or Firefox under WINE until the Linux flash 9 release but it's not the slickest way of doing it.

Group moderation like Slashdot -Pro, very hands off (once past a critical mass of users). -Con, promotes group think.

Wikipedia style moderation -Pro, very hands off (once past a larger critical mass of users). -Con, promotes group think.

Direct moderation (approval of everything) -Pro, very accurate. -Con, very time consuming.

Retroactive moderation (normal form style - post first delete spam later) -Pro, very accurate. -Con, very time consuming and crap still shows up until it's dealt with.

I have never seen a working system that was not based on one of these principles. Things that have failed:

Anything with no moderation at all. Look at usenet. These systems are only sucessful if combined with user filtering - one prospective area might be a system with very good user filtering, but then you shift the burden from the admin to the users and why should they bother when there are people willing to do the work for them?

To give you an idea here is a small graph of spam activity. It took 5 days for comment spammers to find an open site and start abusing it, and once they find something that has worked once they just dont stop. And that's even before you consider the malicious idiots who aren't exactly spammers but just twist and distort and abuse other posters - how do you deal with them exactly?

I found a bug (feature?) last night which allows limited fingerprinting and surfing analysis in Firefox by looking at the way it grabs .ico files.

Details here.

Take a look at this graph (the stats used are genuine).

I have seen the pattern one more than one site, for what it's worth. Amazing really, as a 2:1 ratio of smart to stupid is *way* above my expectation of humanity.

My website contains things like a guide to optimising animations on Linux rather than, say, a guide to breeding monkeys videotaping the results and raking in a fortune on selling the results because if I go for job interviews guess what one of the things they look at is?

Anything on the internet that has your real name on it is probably fair game, and because this is not limited to the internet we all self-censor all the time at home and at work. It's part of being an effective human being - if you always follow every impulse you have then no one would want to be around you. Part of the reason the internet has been so popular is because people *don't* have to put their real name to everything they do and can let out some of their being a jerk with few repercussions.

Is that it's becomming less of a end and more of a means, and an almost invisible means at that (no stupid plugins!).

I turned on free tagging on my website to set up categories (for use with Drupal Views to get a view-content-by-category system) and all of a sudden noticed that the tag input box had a find as you type feature to match against existing tags/categories.

Highly useful, very unobtrusive and just a regualar part of the system getting on with it's job with a gracefull fallback if client side scripting isn't available. 10/10.

listen to your feedback

So this version will actually let me punch internet trolls in the face remotley?

I suppose you could say that if they are using Internet Explorer no further punishment is really necessary. Tell you what, I'll meet you half way - if it's detected that Flash is installed the face-punching module can be turned off and replaced with an endless loop of Joanna Smith's Video Blog Installment 19 (My Trip To Blackpool) instead. Do we have a deal?

On a related note in a tainted and statistically useless sample (ie, mostly Slashdot users) even Mac users can be tempted from Safari it seems - so why everyone assumes that on the release of IE 7 Firefox market share is going to die I have no idea.

Inkscape is king, or try one of the several other (Free, free) vector drawing packages available.

You can easily bolt together page elements and then create copies to drop anywhere on your mockup, and group select to alter attributes accross many elements. It can also import raster (bitmap) graphics to show where photos etc would go on the page.

Output is as .png or .svg, easily convertible to pdf or whatever you need really. You can also use it to create frames and then animate them with the command line tool animate to show functionality that wouldn't work well as a static image like so.

Wikipedia has more on Xara (of course).

I'm a huge fan of vector drawing, even to the point of using Inkscape to animate stuff. I can't wait to try this out, especially if it has better support for frame generation.

He says he now lists an item four times on average in order to sell it, up from two listings two years ago.

This could have as much to do with the number of sellers going up as it could be about the number of buyers dropping due to being put off by being scammed by either a seller or, more likley, eBay/Paypal.

The number of duplicate items listed for just about anything you care to name is staggering nowadays, so it's rare to get into a bidding situation over anything even slightly common. There were, for example, about 30 Aiptek 12000U graphics tablets on there when I was looking for one (and all of them were more expensive than buying one efrom scan - they work with Linux too fwiw).

this, a highly opinionated and biased article about evolution being proof of the existance of God. I suppose Slashdot is good for creativity after all :)

But we have borrowed Expose in return.

Maybe once they have taken focus-follows-mouse (sorry, pet axe to grind - but it triples in value with translucent desktop objects) they can also copy the rest of the cutting edge eye candy in Compiz, like the insane yet cool cube thing and the rather more useful copacity.

Dashboard sucks up WAY too much CPU (especially when starting)

Are you sure it's Dashboard and not the widgets? I installed SuperKaramba and a few changes to the widget files dropped CPU usage from 30%+ to under 1%.

If the widgets for Dashboard are also written by non-programmers they may be suffering from the same problems of polling too frequently. Why on earth do you need to update a display of how much hard disk space there is available every 100ms anyway!

Since eyeOs takes 30 seconds to install I can't see why any geek would want a hosted version. Running on your own webserver you have much greater protection in terms of who can and cannot see the data.

Still, I can see how it would appeal to non-geeks away from home - and it's not much different to placing your trust in online mail, online shopping or online tax return services - all of which have a healthy take up and get a splodge of your personal data.

Well this one is 66% of the weight of the Dell (a big deal for me since I travel a lot - in fact being sub 3lb it's amazingly light), by the time I picked out similar specs for both the Dell and the R Cubed the comparison was around $1700 (Dell) vs $2000.

$300 is easily paid for with the weight reduction and having every bug already worked out so I don't need to spend any time setting it up to run under Linux, in my opinion, but it depends how much you value your time I suppose.

Anyway it's interesting enough that I'm seriously considering getting one as my next laptop instead of a MacBook Pro as I'm not sure I can face messing around like this to get wireless working again when I could have it all functioning out of the box.

As for "online OS", could anyone tell me the benefit of having even less control over the OS I'm running?

I have just as much control over the online OS I use as I do over any other OS... because it's running on my own webserver. I decided to give eyeOS a go after reading about it in the last Slashdot discussion on web based OSes and it's very slick.

Installation was trivial and functionality is pretty amazing. Total cost: $0 ($15/mo for the virtual server but I'm already paying for that).

Now, assuming that you are Joe Average and don't want to run your own webserver... then how is using a hosted virtual OS any worse than using a hosted IM client (instead of Jabber) - plenty of sensitive data available there. How is it worse than using YouTube (have you read the license for that service?) instead of running your own server to host your media. What about web based tax services?

In the end you have to make a judgement call regarding trust. For the average user the tradeoff of trust vs convenience and a well managed (spyware and virus free) system may not be where you think it is.

According to Nintendo anyway. This means that if I got one I'd have to run multiple WiFi networks in my house which seems a bit too much like a pain in the neck for a games console.

Of course the GP2x has no built in WiFi at all, but it does seem like a missed opportunity for a product revision this late in the WEP-is-broken world.

With more and more announcements like these, does anyone else think it is inevitable that Linux will overtake Microsoft on all bases one day?

Technically - yes. In fact there are very few areas where this is not already the case technically, with only the interface features left to catch up.

While this is not a small problem (in fact it's a huge problem) it's also the case that now the big nuts have been cracked, so to speak, the UI problems are recieving so much attention that they are being dealt with rapidly.

Firefox is one example of such an improvement (vs Mozilla) however I'd say that the single best example is the gnome wifi applet. This is an example of what *used* to be required to set up WPA. On X86 it's now virtually a two-step point and click process using nm-applet which supports roaming and multiple networks and autoswitching between available connections.

Enough so that, while I still have Gentoo on my desktops, I run it on my powerbook.

It hasn't, however, hurt Apple - as I fully intend to by a MacBook Pro as my next laptop. Sure it'll still run Linux but Apple will be the one getting the money.

But even in the west I feel more comfortable using Tor, a (well, close enough) anonymizing proxy.

I used to use JAP (a similar project but the client was Java based and less transparent) but Tor is considerably faster. Throughput up to 60K/sec on a 512k/sec DSL line (as fast as it ever goes with no proxy) means that it's practical to use for all traffic and makes the needle much harder to find in the haystack.

Should you have a Windows machine installing IIS is a doddle. (Installing and getting it to display a web page that is - not running it secureley).

Compare this to the http://www.revis.co.uk/site/?q=node/2 Apache+PHP+MySQL steps that one normally sees. It''s not hard, but its very alien to a Windows user.

Thankfully projects like http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html xampp are making life easier - well, not exactly easier, but rather acting in the way that Windows users expect these things to act. It'll help home users get to grips with it, and a large base of semi-skilled amateurs makes for a bigger pool of potential professionals and higher penetration in the long run.