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Like many people, I grew up using Microsoft Windows. I think the majority of people who sit down behind a computer did as well. All throughout high school and college I lambasted every computer I used when things went badly. I have probably done more re-installs of Windows than two-thirds of the people who use a computer. Looking back on it, it wasn't a computer crash or a system glitch that made me look outside the Windows world for a solution. It was a Windows update.

I’ve added a few packages from Debian Backports related to LibreOffice to my Squeeze installation.

Recently, I discovered CoLab. Founded by Casey Stark, a Ph.D. student in astrophysics, and DJ Strouse, a senior working towards a degree in physics and mathematics, this online science collaboration tool hopes to innovate the way scientists do their research work. The site aims to open-source science by having researchers post and update their work as they are working on it, rather than hiding their work until a journal picks up the polished manuscript.

Microsoft has entered into its second Android-related patent agreement this week, with tablet maker Velocity Micro. The deal, involving unspecified royalties, follows others with General Dynamics Itronix and HTC....

Apparently Linus has made another of his grand pronouncements, on a subject relevant to this project (thanks to Pete Zaitcev for bringing it to my attention).

People who think that userspace filesystems are realistic for anything but toys are just misguided.

I beg to differ, on the basis that many people are deploying user-space filesystems in production to good effect, and that by definition means they’re not toys. Besides the obvious example of GlusterFS, PVFS2 is almost entirely in user space and it has been used to solve some very serious problems on some seriously large systems for years. Everything Linus has worked on is a toy compared to this. There are several other examples, but that one should be sufficient.

So where does Linus’s dismissive attitude come from?

Here is the first part of the interview with Keith Poole one of the Linux engineers bringing Desura over to Linux!

Grab Tux Paint, make a cool drawing, win one of 3 OLPC laptops, one of 10 Sugar-on-a-stick and other awesome prizes! The 2011 Tux Paint Summer Drawing Contest is sponsored by Worldlabel.com and is open to all children aged 3 to 12 who live anywhere in the World!

HP is planning to license WebOS making it available to rival manufacturers. While this will expand the WebOS developer pool, it could also cannibalize HP hardware sales leaving HP in a difficult position.

Mozilla has number-creep on the brain. After dealing with Firefox 3.6.17's abrupt end of life in favor of 4.0, and then 4.0's deprecation in favor of 5.0 (and yes, I had to change repositories every time because Linux in general and Debian in particular doesn't force new software on users), now I learn that Thunderbird is jumping from 3.1 to 5.0.

Most Linux photographers use graphical applications like digiKam, Rawstudio, or darktable as their tools of choice for processing and managing photos. But it is possible to set up a photographic workflow built around command-line tools that can handle a wide range of photographic tasks.

Yesterday night Google calmly launched Google Plus; Google’s anticipated and rather rumored social networking website. Though according to Alexa, Google yet ranks as the top site on the web and Facebook is placed in the second position;

Bridge construction set (also referred as Pontifex II) is now available in available in Ubuntu Software Center under the purchase section. The game which tests your bridge constructions skills has received great reviews from critics and users and has won many awards. Released back in 2002 and developed by Chronic Logic, Bridge Construction Set is about designing and building bridges and then stress testing them to see how these creations hold up under pressure. When test vehicles pass over these bridges and make it safely across you know you've succeeded. If they plummet into the river you know you need to go back to the drawing board. So, you must build a bridge that doesn't break in any condition, although breaking and plunging a train into the watery depths can be half the fun.

Microsoft launching Office 365 on June 28, but the cloud computing celebration started on June 27 at Zimbra — an open source email platform owned by VMware. Here's why there's celebration within the halls of Zimbra.

Isolator++ For Linux Enables C++ developers on the Linux platforms to Isolate code and perform mocking easily – Typemock now providing Easy Unit Testing Solutions for Multiple Platforms – Windows .NET, C++ and Linux C++

Which GNU/Linux distribution a person prefers is a very individual choice. Some people like distributions that give them total access: the freedom to do whatever they want. Others want a desktop OS that will hold their hand if they run into problems. There is no single distribution that provides all of the right answers; each GNU/Linux user has to find the operating system distribution that best meets their own needs. In this week’s TLWIR, I will look at some of the best GNU/Linux distributions with a unique twist: I will compare the distribution to the city that I think most embodies its fundamental spirit.

Phoronix has identified the Linux power regression problems it previously noted in Linux 2.6.38 as being related to Active-State Power Management (ASPM) code for PCI Express -- and has published a workaround. The problem, which can result in low battery life with Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15, have been confirmed by Tom's Hardware Guide.

Unfortunately I had to keep working with Windows because of my need for some software that lacks on support for Linux, that simple fact was driving me crazy.... ...I hope this is the day I can say Good by Microsoft Windows, hope to never see you again...

What if while working on a very important document in Google Docs, you forgot an essential keyboard shortcut? Googling for it only disrupts the workflow. Fortunately, the big G has a very simple solution to that problem.

Famously, the Gilligan's Island theme song, in its first season, left out mentioning the Professor and Mary Ann characters by name, simply including the "…And the Rest" in that lyric where their names later were heard. Mystery Science Theater 3000 even spoofed this issue during screening of This Island Earth, in which the actor Russell Johnson (The Professor) appeared. When Johnson first appears on screen while viewing This Island Earth, MST3K's Mike says over the film: "Hey, what's this "…And the Rest" Crap!?!". Indeed, what's that all about?

Sony CEO Howard Stringer told shareholders that his company was the target of hacker attacks in April “because we tried to protect our IP (intellectual property), our content, in this case videogames.”

In April Sony was forced to take its PlayStation Network (PSN) offline for several weeks after hackers broke in and stole information from more than 70 million user accounts, finally relaunching it in May. A similar attack also affected Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) servers, which control Sony’s online role-playing games. Combined, more than 100 million user accounts were affected.