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The only reason that Williamson County as a whole shows a high per capita income is because Round Rock is home to thousands of “dellionaires.” Round Rock is the international headquarters for Dell. Dellionaires are Dell employees who owned Dell stock before it took off and made them some money. A lot of money. At one time there were everyday employees at Dell worth a million dollars or more — thus the term “dellionaires.” Without them, Williamson county population would have a much lower income average.

Let’s face it, anyone still running XP who’s also still using Internet Explorer as a default browser isn’t the most computer knowledgeable person in the universe or even on the block. Forget the fact that Internet Explorer has never been a secure browser, XP users haven’t even been able to upgrade the browser since version 8, released five years ago.

Ikey Doherty is probably one of the most tech-smart people I know. Fact is, Ikey is much like that guy you hear about on the news, the guy that can hear a string of four digit numbers and tell you the sum of them in a couple of seconds. Now, I don’t know if Ikey is capable of that feat, but I do know what he can do.

I’ve spent a good share of my time asking myself what would have to change in order to make Linux on the desktop a viable choice for the mainstream user. I became curious enough to ask you a question: if you could wave your magic wand and change only one thing about Linux or even the Linuxsphere in general, what would it be? Let’s take a look at what some of you had to say.

This project was started a year ago when Kannada Wikimedian Omshivaprakash was trying to help Professor O. L. Naghabhushana Swamy and Kannada author and publisher Vasudhendra to easily access the vachana (verses) of Vachana Sanchaya. Swamy had challenges in using publicly available content on Vachanas since the data was in ASCII standard and searching text was a huge problem. Pavithra Hanchagaiah started helping to collect information about about vachanas and document them into Unicode by writing scripts to customize open source software to convert the Kannada fonts from ASCII into Unicode.

The fact is, we’ll never see “the year of desktop Linux.” Not the way we imagine it anyway. Many of us long for the time when Linux will become a well known alternative to Microsoft Windows. That just isn’t gonna happen.

This, of course, created quite a stir among privacy advocates. So much so that the folks in Redmond on Thrusday announced a change of policy when it comes to riffling through people’s Hotmail accounts. They’re still going to do it, but in the future the company will publish stats regarding its breaking into people’s free Hotmail accounts. In other words, we’ll know just how much they do it.

It’s hard to remember that it wasn’t that long ago that we only had a couple of choices to meet our computing needs. As recently as 2007, the year before Obama was elected, someone looking for a new computer basically could choose between a desktop or a laptop. In mobile, Research In Motion offered the Blackberry, which candidate Obama was famous for using — and still uses.

The sharing feature of the Jetpack plugin for WordPress is currently being exploited for the purpose of sending spam and possibly for DDOS attacks. FOSS Force became aware of this after we began looking into emails being sent to us by our server’s security system, notifying us of massive amounts of email being sent from our server. An investigation by our IT people traced the problem to the “Sharing” function of the Jetpack plugin.

The thing to remember if you should find yourself at a workshop hosted by a person who’s “open source” company really wants to be Microsoft or Oracle is that the open source community, especially at the enterprise level, is a microcosm of the greater community from which it sprung. Don’t be disheartened by a presenter whose message is that “it’s all about the money” and that open source is nothing but another way of doing business. I promise you that two or three workshops down the road you’ll realize that person represents the minority — and that’ll make you feel very good.

Those of us who use Linux as our main operating system are insulated from this problem. A smaller number of us may be trying to help others ween themselves from Microsoft Windows entirely. The first thing some of us do is search for one of the more user friendly distros. A few of these distros claim to mimic one or more of the Microsoft operating systems. And yeah, there are some visual similarities, but that’s where it ends.

On Friday, March 14, the U.S. announced it’ll relinquish control of the Internet’s root zone file, which contains all information about top-level domain names. According to Ars Technica, the move came as a surprise, although the United States has promised for many years that eventually the system would be put in the hands of an international body.

On Monday Ken Starks published an article on Internet access in his neck of the woods, which is outside the Austin city limits. That got me wondering how much most of you spend each month to have the ability to read articles on FOSS Force, watch the latest episodes of your favorite TV shows and check in with your friends on your favorite social network.

There is more to open source than software, hardware and the creative commons. Open source can also be seen as a guide for living life that is based on principles that go back to antiquity. Openness and sharing aren’t only for computers, electronics and creative writing.

AT&T offers their basic DSL service starting at $14.95 a month. People might ask themselves why it’s so inexpensive when compared to Time Warner Roadrunner service. If they had a chance to run each service side by side the answer would be obvious. But it’s not all bad. The AT&T customer gains the opportunity to learn a new technological term — buffering.

It’s beginning to appear to us as if Oracle has absolutely no idea how to deal with the security issues posed by Java. This should come as no surprise to anyone, especially given the fact that the company has been unable to deliver a working website, albeit a highly complex one, even after burning through $100 million of Oregon’s money.

There was a time, back before smartphones and tablets, when most of us used, at most, only three operating systems. Indeed, for the average computer user there was only one operating system that mattered and that was Windows, which held a 95% market share. Even those of us who used Linux or Apple at home usually had to use a Windows computer at work–which remains true today.

Since leaving SCO, McBride’s life has continued with the sort of gangsteresque intrigue that defined him in the days when he was Linux’s public-enemy-number-one. Last May he made news when The Salt Lake Tribune reported that he had turned over a four year old audio recording of a conversation he had with Mark Shurtleff, who had been Utah’s Attorney General when the recording was made.

Anyone still using MS Office should consider the advantages of moving to LibreOffice. For most single computer users, the move can be made with ease. When multiple computers and users are involved, as would be the case with most businesses, migration must be handled with care. However, any effort in this direction would quickly pay for itself in reduced licensing fees to Microsoft.

“Why we don’t all switch to Diaspora I will never understand.”

My friend Ross made this remark on Facebook Thursday as introduction to a link to a petition by Demand Progress, a progressive political action site. The petition addresses Facebook and privacy issues, making some rather disturbing accusations. Although the text is short on siting sources, the accusations still ring true. The claim is that every time something is typed into a comment box but then not posted, Facebook keeps a record.