Blog

A whole series of stories about Intellectual Property. First, an interesting story in the Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail: How copyright could be killing culture.

Two interesting stories from Mad Penguin: a good essay by Christian Einfeldt posted at: Open source is disrupting the fourth estate.
And another: Open Source: spinning straw into gold.

Here's an interesting story about things to consider when moving larger businesses to Linux. Linux.com | Windows to Linux Migration Guide.

Wired has a story about how current copyright law has made it illegal to view a PBS documentary film series from the late 1980s. Wired News: Putting Eyeballs on Copyright Law

In this chapter of the book, I wrote about Mesh Networking as being the cutting edge of wide area networks. At that writing, there were a couple of proprietary mesh networking systems in place, one consisting of wireless lamp-posts in the UK.

Tech World is reporting that a migration of 55,000 users to a Linux desktop has been successfully completed. Techworld.com - World's largest Linux migration gets major boost

As a computer consultant helping small businesses, one of the first things I do is install Firefox on the Windows computers. While there are still a handful of sites that only work with Internet Explorer, universally I find new users like the Fox...

A couple of interesting stories here. First of all, it takes about 4 minutes for an unpatched Windows machine connected to the Internet without a firewall to be compromised.

Last week, my laptop died a sudden, spectacular death by drowning as a full cup of coffee poured into its keyboard. It emitted a pop sound, and the screen and all power shut off.

What would be your reaction? Mine was to immediately unplug the power cord and remove the battery. Then I took it over to the sink and poured out the coffee. Remembering tales of people flushing keyboards with water, I ran some fresh water over the keys and then set to work. I removed the keyboard, the palm rest, a few of the inner cards, and let it sit without power for several hours. Apparently not long enough.

A Linux Journal article by Tom Adelstein argues that studies that show 6% of desktops to be run on Linux in the next three years doesn't take into account all the viruses, worms, and vulnerabilities of Windows. He predicts more like 25% market penetration in this space.

Tony Mobily writes, "The first issue of Free Software Magazine is out! Free Software Magazine is
a new magazine entirely dedicated to free software. It contains quality

LinuxPlanet has a review of open source and Linux accounting software. Unfortunately, they omitted what I consider to be the best for most small businesses, the fantastic SQL Ledger program.