The launch today of Canada’s new DNCL has the website flooded — earlier today it displayed an error page, and when I tried again just now (noon Central), the site displays and allows you to enter a number, but is still to flooded to generate the necessary captcha to complete the registration. I imagine that Michael Geist’s iOptOut site will probably be getting extra traffic today as well — it picks up where the DNCL leaves off, since the list presently has too many exemptions. Story at the Globe & Mail and CTV’s “What you need to know about the Do Not Call List.”
iTWire claims their list of Top 10 reasons why Steve Ballmer should be certified insane is offered tongue-in-cheek, but it is vaguely possible that some people might take it more seriously than that. The list counts down, clocking in #5 as: “Ballmer can get a little quirky when Linux is mentioned. ‘Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.’ Doesn’t sound completely sane to me.
PC Magazine names The Cyber Crime Hall of Fame by offering up a listing of their nine most significant “hacking” incidents — by which I think they mean to include cracking. The list begins with Cap’n Crunch and Kevin Mitnick and moves along the line from there, including entries who made the list inadvertently.
Mandriva today released 2009.0 RC 2, with Gnome 2.24 and KDE 4. The final release date is supposed to be released about a week into October, and include Firefox 3 and OpenOffice 3. I’ve been playing with and running Mandriva since version 5 or 6 or something, back when Linux-Mandrake was an enhanced Red Hat, before it came into its own. Despite the attention that Ubuntu, Red Hat, and SuSE get lately, it remains an excellent distro in my view.
I’m just hoping they’ve fixed the sound bug from 2008 that’s been bugging me. An updated NVidia driver would be nice too. But if we could just get Adobe to update their Flash player for x86/64…
Nice collection of the Top 50 Linux Quotes of All Time… loads of fun. #17. More in the comments, like “Microsoft isn’t evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.” and “Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.” — both from Linus Torvalds. I looked back at our most-linked piece in the archives to see what might be quotable: “Free review copies are provided by book publishers and software companies, and have been for aeons. I can’t say for sure, but Gutenburg probably gave away review copies of the Bible, so this is nothing new. …are good reviews ‘bought’ for Linux distributions? Hard to imagine when most of the product is free anyway. …Did we received a free copy? Yes, it’s called a download”.
Yes, well… —ahem!— after my good intentions last year of beginning to revive this site, my Planet install kakked out on me and I never bothered to fix it, which means we’ve effectively been dormant for almost five years. Prior to that, we had a good run of at first weekly email newsletters in 1999 graduating to daily online content in 2000 and through most of 2003. I’m not promising daily content, but we’re back with a new back end (the old archives are still intact) and the hopes of reviving some semi-regular content. Hopefully this will take pretty much the same form as before… links to news stories with cynical, snide, opinionated, and occasionally insightful summary comments. Not just the news, but opinion as well. Feature articles may also appear with similar regularity as before, if all goes well. This time out though, we’ve got the commenting set up with the new platform — a feature always intended for the old one, but which just never hit the development stage.
