Many people leave their computers on around the clock. This usually implies that all the attached hard disks are always spinning. Constantly spinning up a hard disk normally increases the chances of drive failure. When a disk is not powered it should last longer than if it was spinning.
Read more »Using spindown to prolong the life of old hard disks
Bradley Kuhn makes a better world through software freedom
Bradley Kuhn is one of the founding team members of the Software Freedom Law Center, and a longtime advocate for the cause of Free Software. Many consider him one of the most influential voices in the worldwide FLOSS community. Kuhn, formerly the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, took some time recently to catch us up on his latest work.
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Nearly 20% of Mid- and High-end Mobile Devices Will Run a Linux Operating System by 2013
Linux, which has been much maligned by Symbian and Microsoft as a non-starter in the handset operating system market, is set to see strong growth as issues with framework fragmentation and silicon requirements are alleviated.
Read more »Why Open Source Software Developers are Good Marketers
I have been trying to digest two unrelated stories from last week. The first was the report by the Standish Group on the $60 Billion dollars open source is purported to be costing the proprietary software industry. The second was Steve Reubel’s, “The Web 2.0 World is Skunk Drunk on Its Own Kool-Aid“. As I looked introspectively into these stories I wondered how relevant they were.
Read more »A Quick Look at the Spring GNU/Linux Distrributions: Mandriva. Ubuntu, Fedora, and Opensuse
Andrew Min, a regular poster at Freesoftware Magazine, gives us the lowdown on what's out and what's new in the latest spring collection on the GNU/Linux distro catwalk.
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Does any open source media player stand a chance?
Gnash certainly hopes so. Gnash is an open source Flash player, being developed under the GPL. Currently available only for Linux versions such as embedded GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, they’re working on a Windows port...The question is whether Adobe will let them go any further.
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Closing MySQL: Marten Mickos Responds
News that MySQL was to bring out a closed-source add on has provoked a storm of protest across the Internet. Here is an interview with Marten Mickos trying to explain what is going on
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Introduction to Forensics
There are certain aspects to system administration that you can learn only from experience. Computer forensics (among other things the ability to piece together clues from a system to determine how an intruder broke in) can take years or even decades to master. If you have never conducted a forensics analysis on a computer, you might not even know exactly where to start.
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19 new Debian Developers this week: The Debian Project improves its New Maintainer process
At april 18th 2008, 19 new Debian Developers (DD) accounts were created.
Debian Project is a volunteer effort, and needs more skilled manpower at many human knowledge areas.
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Is Microsoft Causing Epic’s Unreal Tournament 3 GNU/Linux Client Delays and Forums Censorship?
A regular reader, SubSonica, has brought to our attention and grouped together a variety of new stories and speculations that are actively being censored. He shares his understanding of the following Phoronix article, which was published only a few days ago, then adding: “this is the expected effect over Linux of every alleged ‘open’ move by Microsoft.”
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Filing good X bug reports
For Ubuntu, a *lot* of time and effort goes into triaging X bugs. Mostly, this work consists of helping bug reporters get enough data to actually begin troubleshooting the problem. Sadly, a lot of bugs go uninvestigated due to lack of enough info.
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A Linux Server in the Palm of Your Hand
Plat'Home's latest product, OpenBloks is a pint-sized Linux server that weighs in at a measly 225 grams. It's not much bigger than a deck of cards, but it can run many of the same server applications full-sized machines run. It's ideal for many surveillance and automation processes that rely heavily on reliability.
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An Apple User Tries Ubuntu
So as I sat down to Ubuntu, I was curious about the dreaded command line. Would it would suck me into the dark swirling abyss of Geeksterism?
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Bill Gates Ridicules the GPL While Novell Mops Up with Software Patents
There is no substantial news here other than development of discussions, which seem to spread fairly fast from one blog to another blog and soon onto the press. To repeat criticisms from yesterday about Novell’s announcement on China [1, 2], Novell and Microsoft keep spreading software patents to all parts of the world (never mind the legality), using SUSE Linux (Ballnux).
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Imagine There’s No Penguins
What if Linux were not free? Would people still use it? Would it generate as much excitement online? What if the right…no, the privilege…to use Linux came only at a monetary cost money? And that’s a lease, not a sale mind you. What if the product was not intellectually free? How many people would jump on the bandwagon then?
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Read contents from Free Software Magazine
Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanFrom the very start, directories have served a very useful purpose on the Internet. (One I find useful for example is Free Web Directory). News sites can also be considered directories: they index and categorize news stories! What about categorizing software? In the open source world you get Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat; there are still, believe it or not, shareware and freeware directories like FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and Freeware Downloads (although you need to be careful, as they are not like their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselAbout Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software?, it's clear that the topic of software directories is very hot. Most of what you find on Google, however, are not pointing to free and open soruce software -- or worse, they mix the two. Examples of such sites are Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download, which simply don't focus on "free as in freedom", and still can be used as good free software directories.






