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Shuttleworth’s keynote kicked off a busier-than-expected day at SCALE 14X. Sessions on Thursday throughout UbuCon and the rest of SCALE 14X seemed to have more than adequate attendance, especially in the larger rooms at the Pasadena Convention Center. In fact, the Chef Training was standing room only, and some of the attendees had to be turned away.

Starting today, the Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 14X in this year’s 14th annual iteration — moves from being hotel-based event busting at the seams to hold all the exhibitors and sessions to being a full-fledged, freewheeling convention center-based event with wide-open spaces and widespread talks.

But I realized this morning that the emails I’ve been receiving from SCALE — I signed up for them back before registration was open — actually brighten my day and do much to make me wish I could travel cross continent to take part. Indeed, I think that other conferences, especially the big ones, could learn something by taking a look at SCALE’s use of email — for not only do they offer information for those attending this year’s event, they plant the seed in those who couldn’t make it this year that maybe they might want to decide now to be at SCALE 15x.

What hasn’t been cool is the destruction of expensive things that occur when Monty’s has one of his moments. The 42 inch TV donated by Melissa’s church has a plexiglas shield in front of it, and the last two computers we’ve placed in Monty’s home were destroyed as well. The first computer we placed was a fairly powerful quad core desktop with a 22 inch monitor and built-in speakers. Monty broke his left foot trying to pick the computer up and smash it onto the floor. After Melissa and I spoke about it, it was decided that a laptop would be more practical, as it can be placed out of harm’s way when not in use.

While Arch’s taking of the gold wasn’t much of a surprise, given the distro’s commanding performance in the qualifying poll, round two results below the top slot were a little different from what we expected. Elementary OS took second place, with 502 votes, just three percentage points behind the winner. In the qualifying round, Elementary wasn’t even offered as a poll choice and only made the final round due to a write-in campaign from the Elementary community.

The latest Microsoft-loves-Ubuntu news came this week, when Microsoft announced it was open sourcing, under the permissive MIT license, its Edge web browser’s JavaScript engine, ChakraCore, with plans to port it to Linux. While this was undoubtedly huge news to the development community, for the rest of us if was primarily just more evidence of how deeply Redmond is trying to reach its tentacles into Linux. But it’s not just Linux that will be the beneficiary of the ChakraCore port. More specifically, it’s “Ubuntu Linux 15.10,” according to Gaurav Seth, Microsoft’s main man on the Chakra project.

The BSD Certification Group will offer BSDA certification exam at SCALE on Sunday, Jan. 24, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Exam candidates should be proficient in the BSDA Certification Requirements and the Command Reference, both of which are available as a free download. Participants need to register for a BSDCG ID, and once you have an ID, choose SCALE as the site for your exam. Oh, and you’ll have to fork over $75, payable through Paypal or credit card.

A PlayStation hack should come as no surprise to gamers, not with the PlayStation’s history of lackluster security. Fail0verflow has hacked the PlayStation 3, as well as the Wii and Wii U before. PS4 uses FreeBSD and the browser Webkit, both of which are said to be relatively easy to exploit. The PlayStation’s online network has been prone to security breaches as well, with the latest incident taking place only three days into the new year.

Picademy is a two day series of classes taught by certified Raspberry Pi educators. These classes involve learning all hardware and software aspects of the Raspberry Pi. You will also be learning from some of the brightest minds that make up the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

So you think you know your Linux history, eh? It’s time to put on your thinking cap and find out whether or not that’s true. We’ve racked our brains, wearing out a few grey cells in the process, and come up with what we think is a pretty good quiz that looks at the history of Linux from before Linux even existed to just about the present.

But this incident wasn’t to be pushed aside. The emails started coming in faster and faster, until I acknowledged that I had a real problem. Security hasn’t been and isn’t my strong suit. My passwords are almost an afterthought. After all, I am running Linux. What could go wrong?

Sure you go to Linux expos such as SCALE to sharpen your coding skills and to learn about how to get your hands dirty going under the hood with you favorite open source applications. You might even go to learn a little bit about the business of open source. But you have to admit that an added attraction is just getting to see presentations from FOSS rock stars, the well known movers and shakers who have taken a big part in shaping the past, present and future of free and open source software. These are people whose presentations you’ll be tempted to attend no matter what the subject because…well, just because. Some of these are legends; some are not. But they’re all rock stars.

The voting is over in the first round of our annual GNU/Linux distro poll, which sought an answer to the simple question, “What Linux distro do you currently use most?” The result was a complete surprise, at least to us.

When Randi Harper decided to bail on participation in FreeBSD as she outlined in her blog, it raises the question, “Where have we seen this before?” Taking a step back, it raises the question, “Why does this keep happening in FOSS communities?”

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to only use cloud services when absolutely necessary. Web apps are great tools when you need to collaborate at a distance, but other than that you’re better off keeping your work on your own machines, for privacy reasons if nothing else.

The 2nd Annual Pi Wars occurred in Cambridge this past December and just like the year before, it was a complete success. If you haven’t heard of Pi Wars, then get used to seeing the name because this event will only keep getting bigger. Pi Wars is a robot competition that centers around each robot having a Raspberry Pi at its core. There are a series of challenges in which entries must compete, and at the end of the day winners are declared.

Our first major project for the 2016 year is establishing a program that insures every student who resides within the Taylor Texas Housing Authority has both a computer and an Internet connection. I have been working one-on-one with Mr. Bob VanTil to iron out the logistics of this effort. Bob makes sure that this subsidized housing project doesn’t look or feel like government subsidized housing.

We’re going to pretend like we’re AM disc jockeys from the golden days of top 40 radio and countdown the top nine stories that appeared on FOSS Force last year. Along the way, we’ll offer a bit of commentary, and maybe remind you a time or two that things were much different way back in 2015.

It’s time for our annual “What’s Your Distro” poll, to determine who gets the FOSS Force Best Distro Award for 2015. This year we’re pulling out all the stops. We want this one to be a metaphoric old fashioned slug fest that will be played until only one distro is standing.

The results of our hardware platform poll have been tallied and just as we suspected, FOSS Force readers in large part use every platform available. The poll, which asked what different hardware platforms you use, offered a slate of answers too long to list here. Let’s just say it covered the gamut, from smartphones to desktops, and included separate places to tic for different operating systems.