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"This BIOS replacement, UEFI, caused some serious problems with "alternative" platforms. For some time, it was thought UEFI would render Linux uninstallable on any system certified for Windows 8 and up. Eventually Microsoft saw fit to require vendors to include a switch that allowed users to disable UEFI, so that their favorite Linux distribution could be installed. And then some Linux distributions set out to fully support Secure Boot (Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, to name a few). "

"This BIOS replacement, UEFI, caused some serious problems with "alternative" platforms. For some time, it was thought UEFI would render Linux uninstallable on any system certified for Windows 8 and up. Eventually Microsoft saw fit to require vendors to include a switch that allowed users to disable UEFI, so that their favorite Linux distribution could be installed. And then some Linux distributions set out to fully support Secure Boot (Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, to name a few). "

"A summary of Richard Stallman's thoughts on free software, open source, GNU, Linux, terrorism, cell phones and French politics, based on a recent talk near Paris."

"A summary of Richard Stallman's thoughts on free software, open source, GNU, Linux, terrorism, cell phones and French politics, based on a recent talk near Paris."

"People in tech companies and particularly in open source communities believe in and value meritocracy-letting the best ideas win. One thing that's become increasingly clear to me over the past few years is this: meritocracy is a great driver of innovation, but if we want to get to the best ideas, we need diversity of thought and an inclusive environment where everyone feels welcome to participate"

"People in tech companies and particularly in open source communities believe in and value meritocracy-letting the best ideas win. One thing that's become increasingly clear to me over the past few years is this: meritocracy is a great driver of innovation, but if we want to get to the best ideas, we need diversity of thought and an inclusive environment where everyone feels welcome to participate"

"from the free-culture-matters dept We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt. "

"from the free-culture-matters dept We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt. "

"Linux still beats Windows 10 Microsoft's release of Windows 10 has added a new wrinkle to the eternal "Windows versus Linux" discussions online. And recently a Linux redditor took the time to install Windows 10 and do some exploring. While he found Windows 10 to be a prettier version of Windows, it wasn't long before he realized that Linux still beats Windows as a desktop operating system. deathmatch 5 battle fight contest arm wrestle challenge Review: WebEx and GoToMeeting meet their match Adobe Connect and Zoom lead six mostly stellar Web conferencing services for desktops and mobile devices Read Now R3D3MPT10N posted his thoughts in the Linux subreddit:"

"Linux still beats Windows 10 Microsoft's release of Windows 10 has added a new wrinkle to the eternal "Windows versus Linux" discussions online. And recently a Linux redditor took the time to install Windows 10 and do some exploring. While he found Windows 10 to be a prettier version of Windows, it wasn't long before he realized that Linux still beats Windows as a desktop operating system. deathmatch 5 battle fight contest arm wrestle challenge Review: WebEx and GoToMeeting meet their match Adobe Connect and Zoom lead six mostly stellar Web conferencing services for desktops and mobile devices Read Now R3D3MPT10N posted his thoughts in the Linux subreddit:"

"November 23, 2015 · by Guest Author · in Europe, Pirate Party News This post is also available in: Spanish 13 November 2015 cowardice and bigotry have bloodied the streets of Paris and our indignation is huge. Our thoughts are with the victims and their relatives. These lives, cut, broken, nothing will bring them back to us."

"November 23, 2015 · by Guest Author · in Europe, Pirate Party News This post is also available in: Spanish 13 November 2015 cowardice and bigotry have bloodied the streets of Paris and our indignation is huge. Our thoughts are with the victims and their relatives. These lives, cut, broken, nothing will bring them back to us."

"In a morning keynote presentation at LinuxCon, Michael Miller (Vice President of Global Alliances, Marketing and Product Management for SUSE), described himself as just a guy who likes technology. He's also a guy who reads Scientific American and who thought that by 2015 we would all be flying jet packs to work."

"So what might a commons-based economy actually look like in its broadest dimensions, and how might we achieve it? My colleague Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation offers a remarkably thoughtful and detailed explanation in a just-released YouTube talk, produced by FutureSharp. It's not really a video - just Michel's voiceover and a simple schematic chart - but the 20-minute talk does a great job of sketching the big-picture strategies that must be pursued if we are going to invent a new type of post-capitalist economy."

"... For a long time, documentation has been an after-thought in open source. The culture of open source began as a programmer's culture, and for programmers documentation has always been a junior position, usually done at the last moment when experts had no extra time for consultation. ..."

"When does the wisdom of crowds give way to the meanness of mobs? In the 1990s, Jaron Lanier was one of the digital pioneers hailing the wonderful possibilities that would be realized once the Internet allowed musicians, artists, scientists and engineers around the world to instantly share their work. Now, like a lot of us, he is having second thoughts. Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist - he popularized the term "virtual reality" - wonders if the Web's structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, "You Are Not a Gadget," is a manifesto against "hive thinking" and "digital Maoism," by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity."

Still 30-below! lol

it's a balmy -11 now, breaking out the beach shorts tomorrow

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community. ... [M]y approach heavily emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations. Much of the discussion revolves around the choice between markets and nonmarket social behavior. In much of it, the state plays no role, or is perceived as playing a primarily negative role, in a way that is alien to the progressive branches of liberal political thought. In this, it seems more of a libertarian or an anarchistic thesis than a liberal one. I do not completely discount the state, as I will explain. But I do suggest that what is special about our moment is the rising efficacy of individuals and loose, nonmarket affiliations as agents of political economy.

""This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness" - Naomi Klein. Opening with Oscar Wilde's observation that "nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing," Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system. If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world's worth. If we don't want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common. This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn't often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society."

[... It has been sixteen months since I retired - or thought I was retiring - from my monthly column. A lot has happened since. First, my company was purchased by Seagate, and I am now part of the Seagate Government Solutions organization. That, of course, now changes what I write about in this column a bit as I am now a vendor, but I am still going to deal with the big issues facing storage and data movement. I will do my best to continue to not mention vendors unless I am referencing things that are in the news. Secondly, this will not be a monthly column - I'll likely post something every few months. And lastly, I want to thank those who have written in and asked me to keep writing. Thank you! The topic this month is going to be rootkits, which are nasty security issues that I think we all need to start thinking about, as well as what to do about them. ...]

"In this thoughtful talk, David Puttnam asks a big question about the media: Does it have a moral imperative to create informed citizens, to support democracy? His solution for ensuring media responsibility is bold, and you might not agree. But it's certainly a question worth asking ... (Filmed at TEDxHousesofParliament.) "

"The brains of people who get chills when the right song comes on are wired differently than others"

"The brains of people who get chills when the right song comes on are wired differently than others"

Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years-the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success-tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language-seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly-bang!-culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there?

"Open source is as much a philosophy of living as it is a method of creating software. Part of this philosophy is that everything designed by the human mind is improvable."

"Open source is as much a philosophy of living as it is a method of creating software. Part of this philosophy is that everything designed by the human mind is improvable."

"Open source is as much a philosophy of living as it is a method of creating software. Part of this philosophy is that everything designed by the human mind is improvable."