Microsoft adapts slowly to the netbook wave

Quoting Microsoft Reports Second-Quarter Results :

Client revenue declined 8% as a result of PC market weakness and a continued shift to lower priced netbooks.

Sounds like Microsoft unwillingness to sell XP instead of Vista has a very big effect on it. The adaptaion to the new situation might come after the release on Windows 7. Let’s just wait and see…

Also read Ballmer: Linux Bigger Competitor than Apple, and the follow ups made about the slide presented there.

Always use protection

Thanks to Ido, I got a link to TECH SOURCE FROM BOHOL’s 25 Most Awesome Firefox Wallpapers. The one I loved the most is “Safe Browsing with Firefox”:

What’s yours ?

Defeating SSL In Practice

NetSec has published a very interesting presentation about Defeating SSL In Practice from the blackhat confenrece.

I found that a very interesting reading. It also got me thinking about our software indicators.

How to make an open source kindergarten

If you can read Hebrew, you’ll find the original story at “איך עושים גן בקוד פתוח“. Otherwise, you’re welcome to read the post.

Vitali Perchonok was asked to check the computer is his city of Kiryat Gat, he found a lot of old PCs (P1 and P2) with windows 98 and DOS games that don’t work. He decided to find a way to use the computers with open source software.

He found that he can run Gcompris, an educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10, on the old computers. Now he just needs to update the Hebrew translation (last updated at 2005). Along side the translation he fixed bugs, recorded new sounds and replaced some of the graphics (all with the help of a few friends).

To wrap it all, he decided to create a liveCD for the program, and this was the beginning of KG-Live. The changes were sent upstream and should be included in the next release.

Today, the project waits for approval from the Israeli Ministry of Education, before distributing the software officially to the kindergartens.

Working for Free? – Motivations of Participating in Open Source Projects

I’ve been asked to summarize an article by Alexander Hars & Shaosong Ou about motivations of participating in open source projects written in 2000 for a psychology course. It was very interested to see how many things can motivate one to invest in open source.

Although none of the motivators was new to me, I still found the article very interesting. In fact, during the presentation of the article to the class I added my point of view and the reasons I participate in open source. I realized that, although not intentionally, I enjoyed every motivator mentioned in the article, except “selling related products and services”.

It would be quite interesting to have this article done again, as the open source world became bigger and has more payed people working on free software. Any volunteers ?

When Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack fails – use Openoffice.org

When my girlfriend told me her reason for installing openffice.org 3, I was happy about three issues:

1. She started using free software willingly and knowingly (as opposed to back end software she isn’t aware of like Apache for websites).
2. She did that because the commercial software didn’t work for here.
3. The free software did a job she needed to.

And after that description you probably ask yourself what was the task? It was quite simple – open a Microsoft 2007 Word document in Hebrew with Microsoft Office 2000.

At first, she tried to use the “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats“. While that Compatibility pack enabled her to open the document, the text wasn’t readable (probably becuase it was in Hebrew). She decided to download Openoffice.org version 3, which can open this file format, and after a quick installation it opened the document just fine.

So, thank you very much Openoffice.org developers (:

Debian follows Openoffice.org 3.x in the experimental archive

While Debian unstable is in freeze (and deep freeze), Rene Engelhard, started uploading openoffice.org 3 packages to the experimental archive.

I’ve been enjoying following the openoffice.org development process through updating the packages on my machine. As Rene keeps the packages up to date, I got to use 3.0-beta2, 3.0-rc2/3/4, 3.0 official, 3.0.1-rc1/2 and 3.0.1 official.

The packages are uploaded simultaneously with the availability of the versions. As I’m following the RTL related bugs (and fixes), I get a chance to enjoy the fixes very quickly and easily.

So, I see this as an opportunity to thank Rene for his excellent work (;

I’m not going to FOSDEM 2009 after all

Although I really wanted, it seems I’m not going to FOSDEM 2009.

After not attending the last Debconf, I really wanted to see some of the people from the project… But that would have to wait till DebConf 9.

Talks that I think is interesting and worth attending:

• The Debian project by Bdale Garbee
• Reverse Engineering by Rob Savoye
• Help my system is slow… by Kris Kennaway
• Ext4 by Theodore Ts’o
• Syslinux and the dynamic x86 boot process by H. Peter Anvin
• MySQL High Availability Solutions by Lenz Grimmer
• and a lot of talks from the devrooms …

So enjoy the mingling and the talks and see you next year.