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From a business standpoint, Red Hat is eating Microsoft’s lunch. No surprise there, even though Red Hat is throwing the foundering Microsoft an innovation life preserver it clearly doesn’t deserve. No, Microsoft is not in danger of losing their monopoly on foisting inadequate software on an unsuspecting public through a monopolistic stranglehold on computer makers, but they’re foundering in a sense that most, if not all, of the pertinent tech innovation has been coming from the FOSS side of the street.

After corralling the widely divergent world of containers, the Linux Foundation now sets its sights on the API economy and making application program interfaces, or APIs, easier to find. For the uninitiated, open APIs, sometimes called public APIs, describes an application program interface providing developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application.

Today’s hacker isn’t the script kiddie of old. Again, hacking for the sake of hacking isn’t as prevalent as it once was. Today’s hacker is mainly focused on the money to be made by wearing the black hat. Stories in the past week or so have revealed that ransomware from one operation was netting $30 million per year. If you think that couldn’t happen to you, think again.

Actually, the release of the next Fedora release is on time — tomorrow, if you want to go over to the Fedora Project site and give it a download — but even if it was released “late,” the standard by which a distribution is released on time depends on one thing and one thing only.

Taking place on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 1524 Brandywine St. in Philly, the party will feature laptops for as cheap as $20 and the group will also be helping people install Linux on them. According to Reyes, the Nonprofit Technology Resources organization is still looking for volunteers to get laptops ready to use and donate.

Over the last week, many Linux users on Steam were left in a state of confusion when noticing that some Linux games have had their SteamOS icon removed. For those unaware, the SteamOS icon certifies that a title is playable on Linux, including SteamOS, and soon, on Steam Machines.

David was giving his kid brother, Anthony, one more motorcycle ride before the 1968 Triumph Bonneville was put up for the winter. David bought the motorcycle in a government auction with the major components packed in cosmoline for long-term storage. It was the love of David’s life. After the ride, the oil would be removed from the crank case, the gasoline drained and cleared from the fuel lines and then the center kickstand deployed to insure no tire contact with the cement floor for the next four months.

It has been a busy couple of weeks for Ansible, a provider of powerful automation solutions designed to help enterprises move toward frictionless IT. First, Red Hat acquires Ansible two weeks ago, which is both no small feat and a coup for the folks in Raleigh. The acquisition was a smart, yet expected, move: It marries Ansible’s ease of automation to the wide portfolio of Red Hat clientele, driving down the cost and complexity of deploying and managing both cloud-native and traditional applications across hybrid cloud environments. In short, by writing a check, Red Hat expanded its leadership in hybrid cloud management.

Ubucon will take place on Jan 21-22, 2016. With Mark Shuttleworth giving the Ubucon keynote, the event will be structured as a traditional conference with presentations, demos and plenaries on the first day and as an unconference for the second one. There will also be two tracks grouping sessions by theme. The Users track is intended for those interested in learning about the non-tech, day-to-day part of using Ubuntu, as well as how to contribute to Ubuntu as an advocate. The Developers track will cover the sessions of interest to the amateur/professional developer, including topics like app development, IoT, convergence, cloud and more.

The odd thing was that if you didn’t know that attendance was up, you might’ve thought that the numbers were actually going down. That’s mainly because IT-oLogy, the folks behind the event, spent some extra bucks and rented the entire second floor of the Raleigh Convention Center, which gave them a whopping thirteen meeting rooms to use for presentations, plus the third floor Grand Ballroom — large enough to hold a Learjet, with room left over for a Cessna or two — for the keynote addresses. The later addition meant that the keynotes were no longer SRO, with plenty of room for attendees to spread themselves out and get comfortable.

Evidently, the news was that the company is looking for more than a few good men and women who know their way around open source software. I use the word “evidently,” because the announcement was made rather subtly and without fanfare near the end of the keynote. It was slipped in as just another note in a talk about how Microsoft is serious about becoming a good open source citizen.

Linux and FOSS have a wide cast of Coopers and Shelbys making high performance versions of mass-produced distros, building on the foundation of one of the “big three” Linux distros to make fire-breathing, pixel-burning distros; distros that are the digital equivalent of vehicles that are more than just for taking the kids to soccer practice or zipping over to the grocery store.

Doctorow kicks off the Friday edition of SCALE 14X at 9 a.m. on Jan. 22 with the topic, “No Matter Who’s Winning the War on General Purpose Computing, You’re Losing.” The keynote will be given at the new SCALE venue, which is the Pasadena Convention Center.

I thought about ignoring this one and letting it slide, but it’s too priceless, too typically Microsoft, not to pass on. It seems that Redmond has been inadvertently infecting Windows computers with ransomware through its MSN website. Not to worry, however. The company is happy to hand you a tool to remove the malware, which is akin to locking the door after the horse is gone, as your files will by then be locked up tighter than a waterproof safe.

Gamers like myself should be excited about the idea of a cross platform currency. In-game purchases aren’t often transferable between consoles or even different game launchers. For example, if a user were to spend money while playing on a console, any remaining amount would be useless if that person primarily plays on Steam. With GameCredits, it’s possible to save money and avoid the hassle of buying from multiple sources every time.

Upon opening the app, just type something in the input field at the bottom and hit enter. It will “speak” the text you typed in. At this time, if it runs across a word that isn’t recognized or if it’s a potty-mouth word, it will tell you in the upper right hand corner that the word isn’t recognized.

But to those of us looking at this from the outside, what we see is a magnificent irony of good code being produced in what can arguably be described as a toxic environment. That in and of itself is a remarkable achievement, but I would argue that the same work — if not better work — can be done in a realm that fostered more cooperation instead of sniping.

A while back I was fitted for a tinfoil hat by some because I had the audacity to suggest that it would be a shrewd business move by the now-Linux-loving Microsoft to buy Canonical because a.) Canonical had technology that Microsoft would want and need to advance in mobile (like the Ubuntu Phone technology, which blows Microsoft’s out of the water currently), and b.) by this time, Mark Shuttleworth is beyond tired of flushing millions after millions down the toilet (though, as a half-billionaire, he still has several decades of current spending before his bank account resembles, well, mine), and who can blame him?

Actually, it’s something of a miracle that the event is still good-to-go. IT-oLogy, the organization behind ATO, is headquartered in Columbia, S.C., which was subject to massive flooding last week in the wake of hurricane Joaquin. In fact, the organizations headquarters are located only blocks away from the Congaree River, the source of much flooding.

Keeping in rhythm with using names from Toy Story characters, Raspbian Jessie was released this past week for Raspberry Pi users. This latest release marks many improvements and updates that Raspberry Pi users have been longing for. After using and experimenting with Raspbian Jessie for the past week, I have to say that I’m very pleased with the update.