Showing headlines posted by mfioretti

"promoting e-voting just because it can be done with Free Software continues to not make sense. If the software running the system were open it would still not solve any of the problems listed above, or give citizens any meaningful advantage. In the real world, having the source code of a voting machine would change nothing at all at the voting booth"

WordPress is a great online publishing system. One of its strengths, as far as I am concerned, is the administration interface, which I find flexible, efficient and easy to use. However, sometimes even that interface isn’t flexible enough. Recently, for example, I needed a quick way to create and insert into another Web page an HTML list of all and only the posts I had published in a certain date range. If you only have four of five posts to manage it’s OK, but what when, as in my case, there are many tenths of them?

Sure, it runs Android that is (more or less) Linux. But can you call “yours” a car that you can’t customize as you damn please (respecting safety laws and regulations, of course) even if you regularly bought it?

"given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". Is this still true, at least on Gnome, KDE and other Free Software desktops? A few weeks ago my Fedora Linux computer became so damn slow that I had to urgently ask for help. Things are better now, but...

Procmail and Mutt are so flexible and powerful to allow a total customization of email management. In spite of all this, I grew sick of setting options about the same thing, but with two different names in two different files, and in trying to keep those two files in sync. It’s always the same thing, email management, why should I configure things twice?

Just a few days after I had brought back my Fedora computer to life, the last updates in kernel, nVidia driver from RPMfusion and what not made working impossible again. Here's how I (kinda) fixed it, and some kde/gnome cohabitation problems I noticed along the way

it’s high time that all environmentalists (from big organizations to single people) start to realize, better and on a much larger scale than we’ve seen so far, how important it is to have a real understanding of ICT issues (and to use FOSS/open formats) if you really want to protect the environment

What's the right answer to a programmer that tells you "I don’t even care much for people who use Open Source Software that they didn’t pay and then demand to be treated as those who paid something"? Here's mine

the first Italian presentation of Free Software inside a supermarket chain was criticized because that chain doesn't use or sell Linux. I really hope, instead, that in 2011 there will be many more presentations like that one, just in places where nobody uses or sells Linux.

I’ve discovered Linux in 1995 and I have been using it as my only home/work operating system since then. I still love it and mean to continue to use and promote it, but in the last 2/3 weeks it’s become almost impossible. In this page I explain why, hoping to get and collect useful suggestions.

A report on Open Data, Open Standards and Open Government deliberately written to be immediately understandable by, and relevant for, all citizens, not just Free Software supporters and other activists

On November 30, 2010, the German section of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) launched Save As WWF, Save a Tree, a “green” (because not printable) file format. 6 weeks later, I discovered that “Save As WWF” continues to refuse critiques and support from the Free Software Community and also got plenty of other attacks for being anti-enviroment, from a completely different angle.

students of the State-owned Federico II University in Naples, Italy, get Windows 7 for free thanks to a deal with Microsoft, but can't access the University online campus from Linux

A few days ago WWF launched a new file format that should help save the environment, but doesn't support Linux, the most environment-friendly OS there is. Please boycott that format!

The same Italian Region that last week signed an official partnership with Microsoft will issue a law about Open Source this week. Thoughs and suggestion on how to do damage control are very welcome

DaDaBik is Free Software that you can use (writing little or no code by hand!) to create PHP-based Web applications that even users with little previous experience can use to manage several types of (already existing) relational databases. After a long stop, development is restarted and a new release is available. Follow the link for more info and screenshots

The italian region of Puglia and Microsoft say the goal of their new partnership is "to achieve technological neutrality". But asking Microsoft to help you to achieve technological neutrality sounds like a lamb asking a wolf to organize a vegetarian party for the lamb’s birthday.

The day after signing a Berlusconi-like deal with Microsoft, Nichi Vendola, president of the Puglia Region in Italy, published an explanation on the website of its party. Unfortunately, he doesn't really explains much.

OpenOffice.org has failed to provide effective user support via email. LibreOffice can and should avoid the same mistake. Here's how

the success of OpenOffice, LibreOffice and of the only thing that really matters here, that is ODF depends (also) on handling three issues: make it possible to support users via email, explain fragmentation and never, ever mess with ODF.