nixternal

It seems Microsoft is up to their old bag of tricks again. This time stating Linux is violating more than 200 patents. Since Microsoft can’t beat Open Source in a popularity or software battle, they do what they do best, SUE! But who are they going to sue? It seems the kernel violates a ton of patents, as well as OpenOffice.org. I think I am going to just start suing as it seems easy as all hell these days to do so. I need to patent something, and do it quickly, how about the butterfly? Can I patent that and then tell Microsoft to kiss of and start using a grasshopper or something. Plus, don’t they know the penguin would kick the butterfly’s arse (does a butterfly even have one?).

On another note, I found out what it is like to not be 16 today. For Mother’s Day we went over to my brother’s house where he just got some big time basketball setup. Well I still suck at it, but it was fun, when I wasn’t laying down trying to catch my breath. Then we lifted some weights and right now my body feels like hell. Back, chest, arms, shoulders, legs, thighs and arse are all killing me. If you don’t hear from me in the next couple of days, you will know my body gave up and won’t let me crawl out of bed, or off the floor, whichever one I fall to first.

/me goes for the Advil!

The Flourish Conference, put on by the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a great success. Today had many interesting speakers such as Chris DiBona from Google, Peter Brown from the Free Software Foundation, John Quigley from Cleversafe, Tom Callaway from Red Hat, John Doppke from IBM and others. A special thanks goes out to UIC members such as Samir Faci and Thomas Sakkos. They did an amazing job for their first ever Flourish Open Source business conference.

I would also like to thank all of the Ubuntu Chicago crowd who came out, and when I mean came out, they came out. We knew of 8 of us for sure, but upon arriving the Ubuntu area was flooded with members and visitors. I feel bad for Fedora as they had only 1 guy with some CDs, shirts, hats, and one of the “One Laptop Per Child” laptops. He was pretty much sitting in the den of Ubuntu. Battle of the Distros went off with a hitch, which somehow ended up with me and Tom Callaway from Red Hat/Fedora hugging and showing that Ubuntu and Fedora can play nice together! Tom great hug by the way Special thanks to Freddy and Chad for a great Ubuntu talk, Matthew for letting us use his laptop (even though he had some of the ugliest wallpapers I have ever seen) to show off Ubuntu. During the battle of the distros, Freddy asked the crowd how many were using Ubuntu, and I would approximate 90% of the hands went into the air. I am almost willing to bet the other 5 or so that didn’t raise their hand were running either Windows or Mac OS X. Oh, and then there was Tom running Fedora of course.

I learned a ton today. I got to see the latest Fedora Core 7 update and I must say they are on the ball. The artwork is simply wonderful and the fingerprint scanner to log in was awesome. So if you have a laptop with the fingerprint scanner, you will be asked to type in your password, or scan your finger. How cool is that? Tom also did a talk on virtualization in Linux and I was impressed big time. His talk was brilliant. He talked about VMWare, Xen, KVM, and Parallels. It was awesome to see how Xen uses its own Linux kernel and the hypervisor to communicate directly with the hardware. Good stuff.

There should be images soon as well as video of pieces of the event that I will eventually link to. Before I go though, I want to leave you with what is the quote of the day that occurred during the battle of the distros, by who else, ME!

“I am not a fan of battle of the distros for a couple of reasons. First we have media outlets such as Slashdot, Digg, and OSNews that do enough by spreading FUD and starting flamewars between the different distros. I don’t care which release you use, as long as it is a free and open source solution and you like it. I would rather see the distributions coming together and collaborating more instead of constantly arguing who is the best and who isn’t.”

That isn’t spot on, but it is damn close. I was also quoted for responding to the Fedora presentation when they stated that they are based off of Red Hat which has more than 10 years under its belt, and my response was “and Ubuntu is two and half, and ummm, 8 million plus users, and constantly rated number one!” I had to get a little fun in there. All in all great day and a lot of fun. Hopefully next year we can get some famous Ubuntu speaker (*cough*Mark*cough*) to give a talk

Oh, one more quote that I thought was great from a Xubuntu user, wow there are a lot of Xubuntu users in Chicago, and mostly on brand new hardware. Anyways, when talking about desktop environments, and GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox and what not and who was the best, his response was, “same cat, different skin. You can only skin it so many ways, it is still the same damn thing.” So true!

OK, a couple posts down I made light of the Windows vulnerability that is aimed at the animated cursors was fixed just a few hours after my post. Well so we thought. It seems the fix broke Windows XP SP2 systems. If you have Realtek HD Audio then you stand a good chance of not being able to open the audio control center after applying this patch. OH, and you will also be warned that an illegal DLL relocation has occurred. OK, no big deal you say, well guess what, the exploit is not only still there, but even wider now. So who cares? Well the crackers that will be sending out tons of nude Britney Spears images for those who click and get infected. That is an awesome deal!

“A Microsoft spokesman said in an e-mail that Microsoft was first aware of the issues around the update for Windows XP SP2 during the testing process for the patch. He also said the number of customers affected by the glitch appears “limited” at this point, but the company is recommending that users appply the hotfix.”

Interesting, it says that Microsoft was aware of the issue during testing, but because the glitch appears “limited” they went ahead and released it. Limited strikes me though, as Realtek audio chipsets are some of the most popular chipsets there are, and are in a majority of manufactured PCs as well as some custom built PCs where people didn’t upgrade to a Soundblaster setup or such. I guess causing this issue on more than 25,000 university machines is also considered limited as well.

OK, so I promise to not disrespect Microsoft in this post, as I really don’t have to. They have been doing a great job disrespecting themselves of late. So why all of this Microsoft stuff on your blog Mr. Rich? Well a number of people read this blog, not just Planet Ubuntu, but quiet a few other planets and aggregators. My job is to promote Free and Open Source, well it isn’t my job, but my hobby. No better way to promote it than by showing off the continuous flaws in Microsoft. Well Linux has flaws too, and you are correct. However in the world of Free and Open Source software, you usually don’t get the amount of stupid updates that you do elsewhere for one, and two who cares what the reports say, Linux is far more secure than Windows, if it wasn’t so secure, stable, and blazing fast, than can someone explain why it controls more than 60% of the worlds web servers?

The Linux desktop is getting better everyday, and no matter your skill level, Linux has more to offer than Windows will ever have, oh and lets not forget Apple who is over in the corner sitting pretty right now. You may not be able to game or do your AutoCAD like you can with Windows, but everything else is good to go. I have been using Linux forever and the only reason I had the need for a Windows box was to game and do some AutoCAD. Other than that I have been able to follow along in college with my trusty Linux setup producing projects and products that are on par with the rest of the class and at times even better, but of course that is more me than it is Linux

Here is my offer to you, if you have been thinking about trying out this “Linux” thing, go for it. No matter your age, your race, sex, creed, religion, or knowledge, unlike Microsoft, we (Linux) do not discriminate! Give it a try right now!

“Flourish - to grow luxuriantly, to thrive, to achieve success, to reach a height of development or influence.”

Flourish! will be held April 6^th and 7^th at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Some of the speakers include:

• Peter T. Brown - Free Software Foundation
• Chris DiBona - Google
• Angela Byron - Drupal
• Tom ‘Spot’ Callaway - Red Hat
• John Doppke - IBM
• Willy Farrell - IBM
• Paul McMahan - IBM
• John Quigley - Cleversafe
• Jason Rexilius

The venue includes a lot of great speakers as noted above as well as some intermingling time, a hack-a-thon, and a Battle of the Distros (so far Ubuntu vs. Linspire vs. Fedora/Red Hat). So if you are in the Chicagoland area these 2 days, stop on by and say hello. I will be hanging out with the Ubuntu Chicago and the Chicago GLUG crowds, as well as participating in the Battle of the Distros (I am throwing Kubuntu into that mix by the way).

“I must tell you everything in my soul tells me that we should do what I called
plan (b) yesterday. We need a simple fast storage system. LH is a pig and I don’t see any solution to this problem. If we are to rise to the challenge of Linux and Apple, we need to start taking the lessons of “scenario, simple, fast” to heart.” - Jim Allchin

This is old news, as it is the last line in the email Jim Allchin sent that said if he didn’t work for Microsoft that he would buy an Apple. I have been following the class action that Iowa (Comes) has against Microsoft. It is interesting to see that even the executives in Microsoft, may not be affraid of their position, but do realize they are wrong. Of course Jim states that they (Microsoft) has lost their vision whereas Apple hasn’t, and in a way neither has Linux.

So my question is this. Could Microsoft really rise to the challenge of Linux and Apple by taking in the 3 lessons listed above? How does scenario, simple, fast relate to the freeness and openness that our community exuberates? Is their recent bedding down with Novell a part of their “Plan B”? Granted this email was from the latter of 2004, but recent (01/19/2007) court hearings showed that Microsoft still feels the same. Hopefully with the upcoming weeks, more information about Microsoft wanting to “whack” Dell for selling Linux solutions will come to light because of Iowa. Iowa not only grows corn, but they also take on Microsoft. GO IOWA!

On a side note, Norway is taking on Apple to defeat one of their DRM applications. Norway, as do I, believes that iTunes music should be able to be played on more than the iPod. I stand behind you Norway and wish you the best in this endeavor. Apple, just like Microsoft, doesn’t play fair, so be careful.

Now, seeing that other countries are doing their part fighting off the giants, maybe it is time that Mr. Bush shoves a bomb up his ass (don’t flame me, I voted for him twice damnit) instead of Baghdad, and let’s go after these giants here in the US. Come on Congress, wake up and smell the Open Source I bet senators would go for Linux and Open Source if we were to put a few extra million dollars in their pockets (little do they know that Linux and Open Source would save them money, in turn putting more money in their pockets). Since when has the mafia moved from Chicago and New York to D.C.?

The BadVista campaign is an advocate for the freedom of computer users, opposing adoption of Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free (as in freedom) software alternatives.

I had been meaning to blog this but totally forgot until just checking out my FSF membership information. There is some pretty good information on their site, plus I will support the FSF and GNU anyway possible.