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Looks like Darl got the sack in the SCO bankruptcy reorganization. Perhaps the gravy train has finally run out of fuel?

My favorite card game is Krypto. Eons ago when I was a youngun, you could buy this game from Edmund Scientifics, and can still find it on Amazon and other online nooks and crannies. The game is simple: there is a deck of 56 cards numbered 1-25. Each player is dealt five cards, and there is one common objective card in the middle. Players have three minutes to use each of their cards once to form the number on the objective card.

It allows you to get to the internet in 5 seconds from power up. Thats the good news. There is no mention of Linux anywhere. Thats the start of the bad news. There are upgrades of Splashtop available. Thats the good news. You can't run Linux and upgrade. Thats the bad news.

I'm sure you've seen this is as often as I have, even from supposed Free Software advocates: "I can't switch completely to Linux now because I still need this $foo application. When a free alternative appears then I'll switch." They may or may not be sincere; they are certainly missing the point. Because it's not enough to just sit around and wait for the Magic Software Fairy to deliver your perfect applications with all the bells and whistles for free.

The weather here is gorgeous. Sit inside and write an Editor's Note? Are you nuts? I am so out of here. If you're stuck inside, please enjoy these photos taken at various times this year.

This PCPro story says "Microsoft is planning to make Windows 8 an 128-bit operating system, according to details leaked from the software giant's Research department." Is this really a big deal? Are we going to need 128-bit filesystems?

Ken Starks reported on his experiment with running Linux ads on the Kim Kommando radio show in Austin, Texas. Ken sounds a bit discouraged, but he shouldn't be-- it was a success and it proves that advertising Linux works. Let's take a closer look at what happened, and what the goals of any advertising campaign should be.

AT&T announced it will offer the Garmin-Asus G60 Nuvifone in the U.S. next week. In other Linux smartphone news, T-Mobile announced pricing and availability for its Android-based Motorola Cliq, and Android developers are protesting Google's shutdown of an open source version of Google Apps by well-known "modder" Cyanogen, says eWEEK.

Linux is making major inroads into the consumer electronics space, but the old proprietary lock-in and lock-out habits die hard. And why is it so hard to say "Linux"?

But it has a number of fatal flaws. Mr. Shuttleworth didn't make just a couple of careless comments; the recurring theme all through his talk was "Guys are the cool techies, girls are not." He drew a clear line between 'us' and 'them', with 'us' being men and 'them' being women. It was like being served delicious soup, beautiful savory soup with mouth-watering aroma, and just as I am about to take a bite I see a fly doing a lazy backstroke. The closer I look the more flies I see. I call over my waiter and I tell him "Hey! There are flies in my soup!" And he says "Oh, don't worry about those, just eat around them."

LXer Feature: 28-Sept-2009

I just got back from OhioLinuxFest "Forty Years of Unix," and I want to report on what I heard, who I saw, and what I learned. I wasn't sure how it would be this year, with a slowed economy. Compared to last year, it had fewer exhibitors, but roughly the same number of attendees. The raffle tickets sold out, which is a good sign for any fund-raising activity.

FOSS is still a geekbeard ghetto, and it's going to stay that way until some serious attention is paid to community-building, and actively recruiting new people from all walks of life. It's not good enough to leave it at "Whoever wants in badly enough, and to heck with the rest."

IBM is not interested in standalone computer desktops, but selling software as a service. Or cloud, or hosted services, or whatever you want to call it, it's all the same thing: keeping control of customer's software and data, and feeding them like little baby birds, only little baby birds who pay for the privilege. And that is what all the big vendors are chasing now. They're not interested in OEM desktop Linux and never will be. And just like Google and Amazon and other huge consumers of Linux, they'll have a built-in GPL dodge and share only whatever code they feel like sharing.

Here we are on Day Two of the Linux Foundation's Linuxcon, and it sure looks like the face of Linux is still a bearded one, despite the Linux Foundation's grand claims of Community. Perhaps they have a more limited definition of "community."

Today is about sexism towards women in FOSS. It is about treating women differently, and poorly, just for being women. It is about doing harm to FOSS. There are a number of reasons why the participation of women in FOSS is so low, around 1.5%, and cruddy treatment of women is a big one. I don't know if it is worse in FOSS than in other arenas, and I don't care-- I'm not grading on a curve.

But it has some quirks that some days make me want to slap Firefox silly, like when it crashes and there are multiple Firefox windows open, all of them vanish. This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if Firefox isn't just a little too Windows-happy.

Now Linux is the easiest of all operating systems to use, and yet anguish abounds in the land. Too hard! Too hard! Make it easier! What the heck happened?

jp joins the fray, responding to "The problem is really just that Windows is so immensly popular": "Once again, widespread does not equal popular. At one time polio was widespread but I doubt anyone thought that made it popular."

High on my list of obvious solutions to common problems is smart-card password management. Industry, when it ponders the issue at all, keeps offering centralized authentication schemes that they control. Nice user-controlled smart cards to use as password safes are apparently too user-friendly for the titans of tech. I was originally thinking of two types of smart cards: the traditional credit-card magnetic-stripe type that requires a scanner, and a little USB device.

What is exFAT and why should you care? Because the SD Card Association made exFAT the standard file system for the new SDXC cards, and because exFAT is a Microsoft filesystem that claims to be like so totally interoperable, but it isn't.