Showing headlines posted by brideoflinux

Today it was announced that Google is selling handset maker Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. The move comes less than a week after the Chinese electronics company also agreed to acquire IBM’s low-end server business for $2.3 billion. Google purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in 2012.

With our decision to move Reglue to KDE, I looked the landscape over and decided that the Mint KDE LTS version would be best suited for our needs. Friend and Google Plus buddy Randy Noseworthy took the contract for putting together our new LTS release for Reglue. It wasn’t long until Randy contacted me via email and gave me some bad news.

“mintConstructor has been pulled from the repos.”

Back in the early days of the Snowden affair, when it first became obvious that Microsoft and others had co-operated with the NSA's agenda to spy on every living human being on the planet who owned a computer, we said this wouldn't bode well for those who make their living from tech in the U.S. We thought that proprietary software vendors would be most vulnerable due to their lack of transparency, i.e., the lack of available source code, especially after Redmond was exposed for building secret access into Windows.

About two weeks ago, on January 10th to be exact, a call went out for a massive Internet protest, not unlike the protest two years ago against SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation. On that day, David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress, one of the founders of the planned protest, said, “Today the greatest threat to a free Internet, and broader free society, is the National Security Agency’s mass spying regime. If Aaron were alive he’d be on the front lines, fighting back against these practices that undermine our ability to engage with each other as genuinely free human beings.”

The press calls him a “nearly seventeen-year-old” and he’s reported to be one of the people behind the malware used to compromise credit card data at Target and other locations. He lives in Russia and is said to be the author of the BlackPOS malware that was used against Target and might have been used against Neiman Marcus.

On Friday, Roy Schestowitz posted an article on Techrights which seems to accuse Red Hat of being in cahoots with the NSA. According to the article, the company has been building back doors into RHEL for the spy agency. However, the article appears to be long on accusations and short on proof.

Back in November, the popular open source image editing program GIMP ended their association with SourceForge and dropped the site as it’s host. Since that time, downloads of GIMP have no longer been available on the site but have been moved to the GIMP’s website.

Kano began raising funds in December of 2013. Their goal was to raise $100,000 to expand their ability to manufacture and sell a kit that not only taught kids how to use a computer, but how to build one and how to write code to use on that computer as well. It’s designed to fire the interest and imagination of future Anita Borgs and Linus Torvalds.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a patent case between online retailer Newegg and patent troll Soverain Software. The case involved three patents held by Soverain dealing with online shopping carts. Newegg, which has vowed to fight all software patent cases, initially lost in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, which is infamous for favoring plaintiffs in patent cases. However, Newegg went on to score a victory when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled all three patents invalid because they were obvious.

This is a trend with the potential to eventually change hardware as radically as the various open source licenses have changed software. Indeed, it’s already making changes — and the concept isn’t just being adopted by small startups either.

The returned call she promised was as icy and distant as our initial meeting had been warm and cordial. She informed me that her director of IT strongly recommended against such a change. What it all boiled down to was his statement that:

“It might even be illegal for us to remove Microsoft Office or Windows from previously purchased computers, due to the vendor agreement the school district signed with Microsoft.”

The acid test was not how much we liked it but on whether our Reglue Kids liked it. Working with a small sampling of 14 installations and different partition boot options, we gauged how well our KDE version did when compared against GNOME 3/GNOME Shell and Cinnamon. Each one of the 14 kids were asked to use all three environments and give us some feedback.

Since the Snowden leaks revealed that Microsoft has allegedly built back doors into Windows for the NSA, we’ve been saying that the spy agency’s actions are going to hurt the U.S. tech industry’s business abroad. Well, it’s started to happen. On Thursday, Reuters reported that India has decided to drop out of a planned partnership with Google designed to help voters access information.

Firefox OS has a couple of things going for it that the competition lacks. For one, it’s completely open, much more open than iOS and even more open than Android and Chrome. For two, it’s completely based on HTML5.

I wanted to be able to tell you that despite rollApp being in beta it’s pretty much ready to go. Unfortunately, I can’t, because it isn’t. There are some limitations that make using the site a deal breaker for most users. When the developers get those worked out, however, rollApp will be ready to be a major player in the world of online apps.

It’s been my experience that Redmond is loath to give away anything. But since the Android phone and tablet rampage, Microsoft is desperately looking for ways to catch up in the mobile sector. So what do they intend on doing? Well, they decided it might be a good idea to give away Windows Phone and Windows RT systems for free. They see this as a sure-fire way to combat Google’s hold on the mobile market.

Now that companies are closing-out their books on the old year, it’s becoming evident that Linux devices were a big hit in 2013.

On Friday, CNET’s Brooke Crothers reported that Chromebooks, those nifty laptops running Google’s Chrome OS that let the cloud do the heavy lifting, accounted for 21% of all laptop sales last year. As impressive as that may be, the numbers get even better when Android tablets are added to the mix. According to market research company NPD Group, January to November saw 1.76 million Chromebooks and Android tablets sold, up from only 400,000 during all of 2012.

This wasn’t the first time he had problems with his dad and his dad’s computer. It’s been a running gun battle between the two for quite a while. Nick is a Linux guy, but even with his dual degrees and six figure job, he can’t talk his dad into switching from Windows. He has put every safeguard on the computer he could and his dad still finds a way to mess it up. Mostly it’s from “games of chance” sites that he seems to enjoy visiting.

The biggest story to come down the wire this year ubdoubtedly had to do with Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s bag of dirty tricks. Even those of us who have long understood that the Internet isn’t necessarily a place to expect privacy were suprised at how deeply the NSA has managed to reach into the Internet. Odds are, if you’ve been using social networks, everything you’ve posted is now on file with the NSA. What’s worse, every email you’ve sent probably has a copy resting on a NSA server somewhere.

The last time I looked into my crystal ball, it told me to proceed with extreme caution if I invested in Google. Their business model was shaky at best. Needless to say, said crystal ball and I have parted company.