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Humorous and interesting twist on the standard man page :)

Wikipedia is considering a basic change to its editing philosophy to cut down on vandalism. In the process, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit would add a layer of hierarchy and eliminate some of the spontaneity that has made the site, at times, an informal source of news.

Another step was taken this week in the tortuous case which the SCO Group initiated against IBM in March 2003 - but by no means is an end anywhere in sight to the company's misery. Unlike Neil Armstrong's historic statement, it is not a giant step for anyone. Some background - SCO sued IBM for breach of contract in March 2003, claiming that the latter had contributed code to the Linux kernel which it did not own, code which had been developed in conjunction with SCO. SCO claimed to have rights to all the IP for UNIX, which it said it had purchased in toto from Novell in 1995.

Microsoft is buying the election and is set to decide on its non-existent proprietary formats next week.

Judith Kung Fu may be just one of more than 14 million computer-generated characters in the 3-D virtual world Second Life. But with her help, her creator may one day save your life. In Second Life, Judith has walked through the walls of a human cell. She has, in a flash, conducted complicated science experiments that took the world's best minds years to complete.

Although I'm a little late doing so, I'd like to add my voice to Amanda McPherson's in welcoming Brian Proffitt to the Linux Foundation. Brian will be taking charge of a key project, and we're expecting great results with his help.

If you've been waiting for an Asus Eee PC with a larger screen, larger storage and larger keyboard, the Eee PC 1000H could well be the model you've been waiting for. How much will it cost, and what are the specs?

Last Sunday, Terry Childs, a network administrator employed by the City of San Francisco, was arrested and taken into custody, charged with four counts of computer tampering. He remains in jail, held on $5 million bail. News reports have depicted a rogue admin taking a network hostage for reasons unknown, but new information from a source close to the situation presents a different picture. In posts to my blog, I postulated about what might have occurred. Based on the small amount of public information, I guessed that the situation revolved around the network itself, not the data or the servers. A quote from a city official that Cisco was getting involved seemed to back that up, so I assumed that Childs must have locked down the routers and switches that form the FiberWAN network, and nobody but Childs knew the logins.

Last weekend a friend was moaning about endless problems with Windows XP on his desktop PC. We installed Ubuntu 7.04 on it. The problems went away. That started me thinking about my own "daily driver" computer, a Dell Latitude that also runs Ubuntu 7.04, and it made me realize that I hadn't thought about my laptop or its operating system in many months. Linux -- especially Ubuntu -- has become so reliable and simple that for most end users it's simply not worth thinking about, any more than we think about tools like wrenches and screwdrivers. Does this mean desktop GNU/Linux has become so boring that it's not worth noticing?

The real enemy of open source remains what it has always been. Not Apple Inc. The copyright industries. Music companies. Movie companies. TV companies. Radio companies. Book companies. Magazine companies. Newspaper companies. (Often, now, the same company.) Media has feared the Web since the day it was spun. The DMCA and No Electronic Theft Act were aimed at the Internet.

Dell today flipped the switched and is now officially offering consumer desktop and notebook PCs with Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed. Two notebooks and one desktop join two desktop systems in Dell’s open-source product portfolio.

When a genre of software is estimated to account for 15 percent of the total revenue generated by a given sector of the IT industry and that total is $A3.5 billion, then it is time to sit up and take notice. Which is what the government of the Australian state of Queensland has done. Queensland, which styles itself as the "smart state", has provided funding to research company Longhaus to "identify the current and growing capabilities within Queensland's ICT industry" of the open source sector.

I've come to the conclusion that GNOME is not quite ready in Debian Lenny. A lot of strange things have been happening on my screen. There's the ghosting in the upper menu bar, as well as various hard-to-describe funky things happening in other windows opened by various applications. I had used Xfce quite a bit in Debian Etch, and it also works great in Wolvix. So using it in Lenny is a bit of a no-brainer.

Yahoo Inc.'s board of directors landed its first endorsement from a major institutional shareholder Friday, giving it momentum in the fight with investor-agitator Carl Icahn over control of the Internet company. Bill Miller, who as Legg Mason Capital Management's chief investment officer controls 4.4% of the stock in Yahoo, said he would vote to keep the current board in place instead of backing a dissident slate nominated by Icahn.

Some more Unix and Linux related laughs for the weekend.

The reasons that these screeds of hate work so well is that the author really knows what they're talking about. He or she is extremely knowledgeable and able to go into the details of every problem, sometimes as far as analyzing the underlying code and pointing out the problems (thank goodness for Free Software). They're right of course. Some of their complaints are amazingly well written, detailed, and are undoubtedly correct in pointing out flaws in a Linux distribution.

Software installation, deployment, and configuration can be a headache and a time sink for systems administrators. To ease the process, JumpBox delivers preconfigured Web apps that run as virtual appliances on any machine, across platforms, irrespective of operating system. A JumpBox contains a streamlined Ubuntu 8.04 LTS distribution stripped down to running only a particular Web app and its dependencies, including a Web server (generally Apache), a database server (generally MySQL or PostgreSQL), a scripting language (such as PHP, Perl, Python, or Ruby), and other essential libraries. There are preconfigured JumpBoxes available for blogging software like WordPress, content management systems like Drupal and Movable Type, wikis like MediaWiki and TikiWiki, bug tracking apps like Mantis and Bugzilla, revision control software like Trac and Subversion, customer relationship management (CRM) applications like vTiger and SugarCRM, and more.

I was going to explore the new trend of green IT or perhaps talk about the morality of threatening or blackmailing (your choice) software companies into fixing security holes, but an article in Computerworld about a hospital selecting a Linux-based email system with compatible features to Microsoft’s Exchange brought back to my mind a discussion I have had with others about the real choices there are in today's software wilderness. What started the discussion was my thought that one does not have to look too hard to find a pundit saying you have options other than Vista. As a long-time Linux user and evangelist, I knew this to be truth, but with an asterisk.

Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation says Linux is the platform of choice for the mobile and embedded platforms. Zemlin to present “The State of Mobile Linux” at OSCON. Linux is here to stay in the mobile and embedded worlds,

Apple licenses tie you down and are written in a way that would have Einstein tearing his hair out. Open source licenses give you freedom and are written in a language called English unknown to most lawyers. But if a company can ignore an Apple EULA, another company can ignore the GPL. Isn’t that what folks like Harold Welte at GPL Violations are fighting so hard for, the recognition of software contracts as legitimate?