needlessly messianic articles written by ankur banerjee on anything that catches his fancy, which is quite a lot indeed - stuff like tech, quizzing, h2g2 - and cups of filthy liquid almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea
Systems for tracking laptops have been around for some time, plus that case where SETI@Home helped track a stolen laptop. Now, University of Washington is working on an open-source software to solve the same problem. The software is in beta testing stage right now, so might not be very stable - but it’s a step in the right direction - not having to pay a fistful of money in annual membership fees to track your laptop.
Linspire, the company behind the Linspire and Freespire Linux distributions has been bought by its competitor, Xandros. ‘Tis bad business, with former CEO Kevin Carmony getting into a mud-slinging match with founder Michael Robertson. Robertson, who pioneered they very first ‘desktop Linux for normal users’ concept, seems to have fallen for the lust of gold (from the Evil Empire of M$); and given up on his dream. I was rather surprised to know that Linspire’s engineering team consisted of only TEN people! They did make some very promising software - like Nvu, Lsongs, their CNR system, etc - quite a feat with that less people. Also, no wonder Freespire / Linspire release schedules always overshoot their deadline because of such a small team. They were creative, but they were really small.
photo credit: NathanaelBLinspire (the company) will now be called ‘Digital Cornerstone’. Xandros, the buyer, too is a comapny which has been early to the ‘user-friendly Linux’ market, and has carved a niche for itself. It runs on the Asus Eee PC for example, which had garnered rave reviews for its software interface; with reviewers saying “OMG, this is Linux?” The reason for that is that most of these retards (the reviewers) haven’t USED Linux. To the right is the Asus Eee PC, running Xandros. I, for one, have always been supportive of efforts to make Linux more user-friendly - I used Freespire for quite some time myself before getting disgruntled with the irregular release cycle. Hope the new combined Linspire-Xandros entity does well…
Today is the day that Firefox 3 was to be released. I checked their site today morning to see, and it hadn’t started yet, probably because they meant ‘17th June’ as in GMT or some US-specific timezone. I logged in again right now, and tried to do my bit by try to access both spreadfirefox.com and mozilla.com to get my copy of the browser, and BOTH sites are not loading right now. Might be unable to serve pages, or indeed, handle downloads because of so many people trying to access it at the same time. Does that mean it’s a such a success, that it’s become a victim of its own success? Dunno. Until the results get verified, we won’t know whether the record attempt succeeded. Till then, I’ll keep trying to do MY bit for the effort, and see if I can get Firefox 3 within the 24 hour Download Day period.
Everyone loved the Mac vs PC ads, which spawned off a PC vs Mac fan-made ad too. There’s another brilliant guy who came up with a South Park-style Mac vs PC ad. Quite funny, but I rather wanted to draw attention to Mac vs PC vs Linux ad. Cute li’l South Park style characters. And “Are you that penguin?”. Indeed.
