FSM Newsletter 26th of February 2007

FSM Newsletter 26th of February 2007


Mon, 2007-02-26 00:00 -- admin

Hello everybody, and welcome once again to the fortnightly newsletter of Free Software Magazine: keeping you well informed about the realm of free software! Happy reading!

General announcements

Now that the dust has settled from our no-more-PDF statement and we have made our position clear, our main aim this fortnight has been ensuring the printer-friendliness of all of our articles. We appreciate all of the support we have had from our loyal readership, and thanks to all of you who have sent messages of support and donations.

Latest content

Wot? Not Vista?—Eddie Macnaghten got his kids off Windows and onto Ubuntu... which didn’t stop his dinner guests accusing their slick new system of being Vista... Read more...

**Of virtual machines and gained productivity—and hardware **—Mitch Meyran describes his virtual machine... Read more...

**The seven sins of programmers **—Thanks, Steve Goodwin! Now we realise what little sinners all those programmers are! Read more...

**Involving the community: my podcast experience **—Jonathon Roberts describes setting up a podcast which attends to those in the free software community. Read more...

**Trial balances and tribulations: attempting to import MS Money data **—Chris Mostek gives a comprehensive report on getting his MS Money data onto a free software program... and you’ll thank him for doing the leg work for you! Read more...

**The massive failure of FOSS **—Chris Holt has some things to say on “breakthrough ideas for 2007”—FOSS, a failure? Get real! Read more...

**The participation culture **—Anthony Taylor examines what makes a culture of participation work... well. Read more...

GNOME vs KDE—Jonathon Roberts is the voice of reason: bringing impartiality to the GNOME/KDE debate. Read more...

Asterisk, the easy way—Mitul Limbani talks about Asterisk, the free software phone system, and why it’s so awesome. Read more...

Interoperability, choice and Open XML—spot the odd one out—Eddy Macnaghten examines the cuddly, pro interoperability side of Microsoft. HAH! Read more...

Latest content continued

**Why does KDE use slaves? **—Jabari Zakiya puts the question out there—isn’t it time to move away from the master/slave paradigm in computing? Read more...

**Jim Kent, hero of free and open source software **—Gary Richmond shares a story about a man who helped technology in the world... with free software. Read more...

**Interview with Mark Shuttleworth: ask your questions here! **—Jonathon Roberts has Mark Shuttleworth as his next podcast guest and he wants your input! Read more...

**Vega Strike: my kind of fun **—Alan Berg tells you everything you always wanted to know about Vega Strike—not just another space fighter simulator. Read more...

**GPLv3: Do we really need it? **—Wouter Verhelst explains why, in the face of opposition, GPLv3 is a good thing... Read more...

If transparency is what you want...—Dave Guard, Free Software Magazine’s editor, explains further the position of Free Software Magazine removing PDF magazines. Read more...

**Do me a favor, don’t try Linux **—Ken Leyba has a request for anyone who isn’t going to test Linux right. Just don’t bother. Read more...

**ISO won’t fast-track MS OOXML consideration **—Ciaran O’Riordan provides some resources for further reading on Microsoft’s bid to be fast tracked. Read more...

Help yourself—Jonathon Roberts gives tips to new users: how to do stuff yourself! Read more...

A media centre based on GNU/Linux—David Carboni challenges himself and hacks in the living room... Read more...

Latest book reviews released

**Red Hat Fedora Core 6 Unleashed by Andrew Hudson and Paul Hudson** Alan Berg looks into the new Fedora core. Read more...

**Beginning GIMP: from novice to professional by Akkana Peck** Bridget Kulakauskas discovers the ins and outs of the GIMP. Read more...

Book competition announcement for this fortnight

This week we are giving away a copy ofThe Definitive Guide to GCC by William von Hagen and a copy of Pro Apache XML by Poornachandra Sarang.

All you need to do to enter is check out the latest book competition announcement on our blogs page.

GOOD LUCK!

Thanks go to _Apress for providing these fantastic prizes._

Winner of the book competition from last fortnight

Thanks to all those who entered, unfortunately there can only be one winner...

Congratulations Tyler Smith of Nova Scotia in Canada!

Tyler has won copies of Self Service Linux and Embedded Linux Primer.

Thanks to all who entered.

Thanks also go to Prentice Hall for providing these great prizes.

Winner of the book competition from the 29th of January

Thanks to all those who entered, unfortunately there can only be one winner...

Congratulations Kurt Pfeifle of Stuttgart in Germany!

Kurt has won copies of Ubuntu Hacks and Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two.

Thanks to all who entered.

Thanks also go to O’Reilly for providing these great prizes.

Please comment wherever possible and don’t forget to log in so that you’ll be in the running to win the latest book competition

Poll Results—Who should be the next president of the United States?

We went for a little light hearted fun this week, and it turns out that the out and out winner of this little comp is Richard Stallman, who romped home with 59% of the vote. Maybe we should suggest he runs... Stallman was followed by Linus Torvalds with 23%, Steve Jobs with 16%, and lagging behind was Bill Gates at 14% and most of his votes were from people who want him out of the IT industry. Read more here and stay tuned for...

This fortnight’s poll

How worried are you about trusted computing, DRM, and software patents?

Do you think Digital Rights/Restrictions Management, Trusted/Treacherous Computing and software patents spell the end for free software, will the powers of good prevail, or will the outcome fall somewhere between these extremes? Please let us know your thoughts by voting and by commenting.

Reminders

Comments

Your comments on articles, issues, and blog entries are very welcome. They provide other readers with insightful suggestions, further information, and the feeling that they are not alone. They also provide our authors with the feeling that they are being heard. Please comment wherever possible and don’t forget to log in so that you’ll be in the running to win the latest book competition.

Avatars

Avatars are a great way of expressing your personal identity, whether it be a photo or an image that you feel represents the you you want to be. Read more about avatars here. To add an avatar: log in, go to “my account” in the menu on the left, go to the “edit” tab and scroll down to where it says “Upload picture”. Now, hit the browse button, find the image on your computer that you want to upload and go to the bottom of the page and hit the submit button. That’s it; you now have an avatar image.

Donate

As you might know already FSM is a low profit project with all funds raised going back into producing the fine magazine you can download for free.

Think about how much you would normally have to spend buying a magazine of this quality. We provide it for free!

Your donations will help us to continue spreading the word about free software and producing more fantastic issues.

Contacting us

If you’d like to contribute to FSM: read our Write for us page. Then send your proposal to proposals@...

If you have some feedback for us about our site or its content, then drop us a line at input@...

If you are interested in advertising on our site, or in our magazine or newsletter, you can find more information on our Advertise page or send an email to advertise@...

If you need help with your account for any reason, please send an email to helpdesk@...

Please add freesoftwaremagazine.com to the ends of the email addresses above. Sorry for the inconvenience but spammers make this necessary.

Thanks

Thank you for subscribing to Free Software Magazine. You are a part of a growing community who help to raise the awareness of, and educate new users in, the joys of free software. Without you we would not have this community and without you we would not have a magazine. Happy reading!

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Most forwarded

Interview with Dave Mohyla, of DTIDATA

Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.

TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.

Anybody up to writing good directory software?

Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).

Interview with Mark Shuttleworth

Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.

Is better education the key to finding better software?

I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.

Most emailed

Free Open Document label templates

If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels

Creating a user-centric site in Drupal

A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was "Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for". His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.

Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!

So, why, why do people and companies develop free software?

More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.

When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.

Sure, anybody can buy laptops, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?

Fun articles

Santa Claus - the most successful open source project

It dawned on me the other day, as I was shopping for the dozens of gifts it seems I have to buy every December, that Santa Claus is the most successful open source project in history. (Bridget @ Illiterarty would agree with that). Santa Claus is essentially a marketing development that is embodied by everyone who stuffs a sock, gives a gift, hosts a dinner or wishes Merry Christmas over the holiday season.

Most emailed

Editorial

When I first started thinking about Free Software Magazine, I was feeling enthusiastic about the dream. I had Dave, Gianluca, and Alan willing to help me, I had established members of the free software community willing to help me out, I had writers volunteering their time and energy for free, and I had a generous offer from OpenHosting for servers, all before I'd proved myself. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I could make this work.

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