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Another Look at Thoggen (Part 1)
Thoggen is a tool for backing up DVDs to the ogg container with the theora video codec and vorbis audio codec. Theora is the darling video codec in Linux because it is unencumbered by patents. There are other free formats, such as Xvid – a format compatible with Divx, but it is based on MPEG-3,…
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Windows Tax – you don’t need to pay it anymore!
Dell has introduced (or, if it’s been around for a while, it was just recently brought to public attention) the nSeries Desktops. These are computers that have no installed operating system – so you don’t have to pay for windows. It comes with a Freedos disk. So you can install Linux, *BSD, or whatever you…
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Finally, some rulings that make sense!
Joystick.com reports that judges are finally starting to make some rulings that make sense! We all know (if from nowhere else, than from this blog) that the DMCA is evil. It allows all kinds of restrictions to be placed on you, even though you were a good citizen and bought the content legally. For example,…
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More Updates on the Novell and Microsoft Deal
Eben Moglen, a lawyer for the Free Software Foundation, remarks that the new deal may violate Section 7 of the GPL! So now you see that the stakes in the GPLv3 talks are very high! The GPLv2 may indeed be our saviour against Microsoft’s tyranies, but more on that momentarily! Mr. Moglen specifically comments: “If…
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Songbird takes flight…and other lame puns
As I read my Linuxtoday.com RSS feed today, I discovered a new piece of software. Songbird aims to be, in their words, “the Firefox of media players.” They seem to be on the right track. First of all, it works on all majors operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux (and by extention BSD). Second, it…
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10 Reasons to use Linux instead of Windows….
Borys Musielak, has published an article on polishlinux.org on his top ten reasons why Linux should be used instead of Windows. I have just finished part one, which is what the previous link goes to. Although he claims that he is purposely being biased against Windows, he’s actually quite fair towards Windows. For example: What’s…
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Use Minix….create a free OS?
As we all know, Linus Torvalds created Linux out of his frustration with the lack of features in Minix, a teaching OS meant to duplicate a POSIX-compliant Unix system. Well, as a great followup to Saturday’s Post, why not check out Minux yourself? A new group has begun developing Minix3, in the hopes of getting…
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The new server is up!
This server is now running on a FreeBSD box instead of Fedora Core 1. It’s also 1 GHz instead of 300Mhz. Man, I have gone from being scared to install anything that wasn’t an RPM package a few years ago to where yesterday I compiled a custom kernel for the first time ever!! That is…
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Upgrade?
Danielle’s job is getting rid of some old computers – all of which are way, way better than my current server. My current server is a P II 333 Hz computer!!! And it only has a 4 GB hard drive, most of which is full! By contrast, the cheapest computer they’re selling at Danielle’s work…
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“Trusted” Computing
The computing industry has lots of euphimisms, but one of the ones that gets me really miffed is “trusted computing”. It is a process by which computer companies are trying to exert THEIR control on machines WE have bought with OUR money! Trusted Computing is the way they show they don’t trust us, but not…
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The OTHER Free Operating System
After reading about the BSDs in Linux Format Magazine a few months ago, I started to wonder about these Linux cousins. The original Berkely Software Devision port of Unix was developed a long time ago, but the free ones developed almost simultaneously with the Linux kernel had remained hidden from me up til now. Even…
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Xen – a more enlightened look
I first read about Xen while still at Cornell. I think it may have been my Junior year. I don’t have the magazines with me at the moment, so I can’t verify. When I finished reading about the new technology in Linux Format Magazine, I racked my brain, but couldn’t find a reason to run…
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Computer Compatibility finally arriving!
In the olden days of computers, they were as good at communicating as the people on earth after the Tower of Babel incident. Not only did none of the scant networking protocols interact well, but the floppy disks were sometimes completely different sizes. That is, when there were disks; there were some systems based on…
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ReactOS – The Soap Opera-like Twin
So, as readers of my blog know, one alternative to Windows is Linux. (Formally GNU/Linux) Another alternative I haven’t talked much about is BSD, another Unix derivative. Both of these are great operating systems, but they aren’t Windows. For the most part, this doesn’t matter. If I can do the same stuff on Linux, why…
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Linux on Windows without the Dual-Boot
VMware has relased their VMware Player player for free. This product acts as a virtual machine (as opposed to an emulator) and is, therefore, supposed to give you much faster speeds than a program like QEMU. You could use it to run Windows on Linux or Linux on Windows. I will go over putting Linux…