Mar 31, 2010 GMT
Today (March 31st) is Document Freedom Day, and I encourage everyone to talk about Document Freedom with all of your friends, and even your enemies. In 1973 I worked for Aetna Life and Casualty, at that time the “largest commercial user of IBM equipment in the Free World”. We did not know what the government was using, and we did not know what the Russians were using, but other than that, Aetna was the largest. Aetna had an on-site tape library of 500,000 12 inch diameter magnetic tapes, with another 100,000 stored in a salt mine someplace in Idaho for “long term storage”. The tapes were labeled starting at “1” and went sequentially up from there. When the...Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog
Mar 30, 2010 GMT
A couple of weeks ago I went to Souhegan High School in Amherst, New Hampshire to vote, and while there talked with their computer technical person (they are mostly a windows shop, but also have MACs) and offered to do a presentation to the students and faculty on FOSS and free culture. They asked their Community Service Coordinator, Ms. Maggie Paul to arrange it. Ms. Paul arranged for 16 students, selected by their teachers, to come to a classroom at lunch time and hear my 45 minute talk. Also attending were Ms. Paul, the Community Service Coordinator, the technical person from Souhegan and a coordinator from another school in the area, since that schoool had just gotten an application...Mar 29, 2010 GMT
Many years ago I was working for Digital Equipment Corporation as a software engineer in New Hampshire.The marketing people and product managers liked taking me to customer presentations because I could often take very technical subjects and explain them in terms the customers (and the marketing people and the product managers) could understand. I was gifted.One particular time Digital's sales people on the west coast had put together an “event”, and we were told that there would be “over 300 Unix customers” to listen to the presentation.So three people (one marketeer, one product manager and I) got on an airplane and flew across the continent to present Digital's Unix...Mar 22, 2010 GMT
It was a love affair that started over sixty years ago between technology and model railroading.In 1946 a group of students at MIT banded together to form the “Tech Model Railroad Club” (TMRC) in a gigantic old “temporary” building which itself became famous for the large number of projects started there, “Building 20”.For TMRC, model railroading was more than just paper-mache scenery and tin-plate tracks. The real challenge was to develop the control circuitry and programming to run the trains, switch the switches and capture the realism of railroading.Computers were just being invented. At places like Harvard, just down the street from MIT, the Mark I was donated by IBM on...Mar 16, 2010 GMT
Extreme Austin! - The Texas Linux Fest!Austin, Texas! Home to live music, great food, a world-class University (U of T) and the longhorns!) and IBM's Linux Technology Center is a great place to have a Linux Fest, and that is what is happening on April 10th, 2010.For just one day the Linux Faithful are going to descend on Austin with a packed program that ranges from beginner subjects to those that would teach the experts in FOSS. After forty years in computer science (and most of those years using what most people would call today “Open Source”), I still find it is impossible to keep up with every aspect of it, so you will probably see me slip into a few of these talks to both learn...Mar 02, 2010 GMT
Dear Ambassador Kirk, Recently it was reported in the Guardian, an on-line newspaper, that the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) is requesting that the United States Trade Representative put Indonesia, Brazil and India on the "Special 301 Watchlist" specifically because those countries advocate the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in their economies. I have been in the software industry for over forty years, as a programmer, businessman, educator, author and entrepreneur. I have worked in some of the largest companies, both as a supplier of software and a customer of software.I have traveled to two of these three countries, and while I have not been...Feb 28, 2010 GMT
Project Cauã (www.projectcaua.org) is starting to evaluate configurations for a Thin Client. Actually we have been thinking about thin clients for some time, and trying to find a good design to meet all the needs of the project. Although we have some general ideas, a long time ago I realized I was not omnipotent, and that the best way of finding good information was to pose the question to the FOSS community and let them help you solve the problem.....First, some design considerations for the thin client. The design considerations below are purposely a little vague and are acknowledged as incomplete. We did not want to limit people's thinking too much, and wanted to offer some...Tag Cloud
News
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Google and NASA Partner in Quantum Computing Project
Vendor D-Wave scores big with a sale to NASA's Quantum Intelligence Lab.
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Mageia Project Announces Mageia 3 Linux
Many package updates and Steam integration highlight the latest from the Mandriva-based community Linux.
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FSF Outs the World Wide Web Consortium over DRM Proposal
Richard Stallman calls for the W3C to remain independent of vendor interests.
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Debian 7.0 Debuts
The new release supports nine architectures, 73 human languages, and zero non-Free components.
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Alpha Version of Fedora 19 Released
Fedora developers release the first alpha version of Fedora 19, known as Schrödinger’s Cat, for general testing. The final release is expected in July 2013.
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ack 2.0 Released
ack is a grep-like, command-line tool that has been optimized for programmers to search large trees of source code.
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SUSE Studio 1.3 Released
New features in SUSE Studio 1.3 include enhanced cloud integration, VM platform support, and lifecycle management.
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Xen To Become Linux Foundation Collaborative Project
The Linux Foundation recently announced that the Xen Project is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.
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RunRev Releases Open Source Version of LiveCode
Open source version of LiveCode is now available for developing apps, games, and utilities for all major platforms.
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OpenDaylight Project Formed
OpenDaylight is an open source software-defined networking project committed to furthering adoption of SDN and accelerating innovation in a vendor-neutral and open environment.

