Nov 30, 2010 GMT
Recently I was watching a video that Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, the founder of the Xiph.org project had produced on audio and video formats. They did a good job on the video, putting it out in both WebM format and Ogg format, with subtitles in English, French, German, Portuguese (Brazil) and Russian. They even include the SRT files so other subtitle translations could be done. About position 7:36 on the video, where Monty was describing how "there is no such thing as a perfect transistor, or a perfect inductor or a perfect capacitor" , I burst into laughter. In 1972 I told my college roommate *exactly* *those* *words* while he was studying digital...Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

Nov 28, 2010 GMT
CeBIT, held in Hanover, Germany each year, is the largest IT trade show in the world. Companies come from all over the world to show their goods and services to each other, and to make deals. For several years now Linux New Media, the publishers of various Linux magazines around the world has sponsored a “Linux Park” at CeBIT.For the past three years, in the spirit of “Free and Open”, Linux New Media has offered free exhibit space to Open Source projects. This gives an excellent opportunity for projects to “show their stuff” to both “the choir” of FOSS people that stop by and to other people who are just learning about FOSS. Interested projects have about two weeks to find...Nov 10, 2010 GMT
I am at Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, attending a conference called Latinoware. Of course I am seeing a few old friends and many new ones, but I am also happy to report that the facilities for Latinoware, which is held on the grounds of the Itaipu hydro-electric plant, have been upgraded to be a very comfortable conference facility. There is a good-size exhibition hall, many different rooms for the different talks, and is well laid out. The conference attendees are even more diverse this year than past years, with people from Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Uruguay and other South American countries. Early (for me) in the morning I...Oct 31, 2010 GMT
My friend Benjamin Scott send some email around today stating that Alcatel/Lucent had published all the old Bell System Technical Journals from 1922 to 1983 online and freely accessible. As Ben said:Bell Labs practically invented much of our recent civilization (communications theory, transistor, laser, microchip, Unix, the list goes on). The public switched telephone network, before the Internet came along, was probably the most complicated system in human existence. They documented a lot of it in these journals. Making them available like this is a huge boon to technology historians. My favorite Bell System Technical Journal (BSTJ, for short) was Volume 57.6, published in August of...Oct 31, 2010 GMT
One of my favorite sayings has always been “You should eat your own dog food”. When applied to programming it quite simply means that you should use the code that you generate. I started saying this many years ago when I noticed that the Unix product managers at Digital Equipment Corporation were not using Unix in their day to day work. They had Microsoft Windows systems on their desktop, and would often go over to VMS to use “EDT” (the VMS text editor) for doing “real editing”. One product manager at a very high level even admitted to “hating Unix”, and when asked why they were the product manager of a product they hated said “Where else could I make this...Oct 30, 2010 GMT
Recently I was reading an article that was quoting Steve Jobs about how the Android phones from different manufacturers were all slightly different. He was pointing out that HTC and Motorola were putting on slightly different human interfaces and that this was crazy compared to his iPhone where all the phones were exactly the same. I started wondering what world Mr. Jobs lives in. Is it a world where every car is the same? Every house is the same? Do people shop around for different makes and models of things out of some type of twisted self-hate, or is it that people like to have choice in the way things look and work? As a software developer, I can appreciate the fact...Oct 29, 2010 GMT
Readers may have noticed that I have a theme lately regarding storage sizes, for example talking about disk drives and the TK50 tape drives. This was in anticipation of purchasing a new “laptop” computer, the first new one I have had in six years. More about that machine tomorrow. Recently I reached into the history museum of my mind and pulled out an old memory board from a VAX 11/780 that we used at Bell Laboratories in the time-frame of 1980. That VAX system used quarter- megabit integrated circuits on the memory boards for its main memory. Since the VAX used ECC correctable memory, it meant that each quarter megabyte of memory had eight chips for the actual data and a...Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.