LXer Weekly Roundup for 17-Jan-2010

LXer Feature: 18-Jan-2010

Linux Will Save The World: Remember Apple's famous 1984 commercial? That is one of the most brilliant TV commercials of all time, which isn't surprising- Ridley Scott directed it, and legendary advertising agency Chiat/Day produced it. It is a superb piece of filmmaking that still gives me chills, even in the lo-fi YouTube version. And then the spell wears off, and I realize Orwell was a prophet, the commercial bears no relationship to the product, and the athlete wearing the Apple shirt should have a penguin logo on it instead of the Macintosh logo.

Mozilla Starts to Follow a New Drumbeat: As Firefox gets closer and closer to that 50% market share around the world (it's already there in some countries), the question is: what next? The answer is Mozilla Drumbeat, an ambitious project to "make sure the internet is still open, participatory 100 years from now."

Microsoft needs swift kick in the boot-up: That long wait while Windows cranks up can be avoided, says Rich Jaroslovsky It took about 20 years before television viewers no longer had to wait for their sets to warm up. Yet here we are, 30-plus years into the personal computer era, and the instant-on PC remains elusive. That may be about to change.

An Android Developer's Top 10 Gripes: Put on your favorite self-pitying emo music and get ready for some developer frustration. I'm running down the top 10 things I love to hate about Android.

Watching TV and Linux: This all started a couple of weeks ago when I finally got around to putting the tv capture card I had picked up a year or two ago into my computer. Happily like most things in Linux, it just worked, that was a great plus. Sadly the software packages in existence that I ran across were either too much or too little, nothing was just right.

The biggest threat to Microsoft isn't Apple or Linux, it's falling hardware prices: Two interesting tidbits of news about Microsoft today. First is that the company is to make it legal to rent both Windows and Office. The second is an analysis on how slates will affect the Redmond giant’s bottom line. Both are interesting reading, but both also are indications of the problems that Microsoft is likely to encounter over the coming years.

Canonical To Bring Closed Source Apps Like iTunes And Photoshop To Ubuntu?!?!: A recent official post on the Ubuntu Forums asks users to complete a survey with the applications they would like to see in upcoming version of Ubuntu..

7 Alternatives for Microsoft Office: Microsoft Office is one of the most popular application suits which no doubt facilitates the users to the full extent. But due to its high price or due to any compatibility issue with the operating system, it is always desirable to have some alternatives. Lets have a summarized look on the available alternatives.

The best Linux file system of all?: Want to get Unix/Linux techies arguing? Besides classic flame wars such as whether vi or EMACS is the better text editor, another surefire way to start a fight is to talk about which file systems are the best. Google, which knows a thing or two about fast systems has decided, for their purposes anyway, that Ext4 is the best and close to the fastest file system of all.