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[blag - News blag 140000 (Spartakus) is out now! There are Live CDs for x86 and x86_64 boxes. Live CD ISOs are there: ftp://blag.fsf.org/140000/en/iso/ More coming soon! blag - Important There is a blag group on facebook. It is not an official one since blag isn't on facebook and support FSF campaign "You won't find us on facebook". But blag is on identi.ca blag - le brixton linux action group works to overthrow corporate control of information and technology through community action and spreading Free Software. blag - blag linux and gnu blag is an operating system. blag has a suite of graphics, internet, audio, video, office, and peer to peer file sharing applications. you can replace a windoz installation with blag. if you would like to install and run blag, download and burn it to cd. blag - Icecat This release of BLAG has GNU IceCat as the default browser. You may learn more there: GNUzilla and IceCat blag - Sylpheed Sylpheed is now Blag mail client by default. More: Sylpheed]

"by Richard Stallman Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is a matter of principle, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society bette"

Good story of how a UK Company responded to Microsoft's announcement if XP end of life. After examining many alternatives, they settled on a ChromeBook-ChromeBox - Citrix solution. Most of the existing desktop hardware was repurposed as ChromeTops running Chrome Browser apps and Citrix XenDesktop for legacy data apps. excerpt/intro: "There are the XP diehards, and the Windows 7 and 8 migrators. But in a world facing up to the end of Windows XP support, one UK organisation belongs to another significant group - those breaking with Microsoft as their principal OS provider. Microsoft's end of routine security patching and software updates on 8 April helped push the London borough of Barking and Dagenham to a decision it might otherwise not have taken over the fate of its 3,500 Windows XP desktops and 800 laptops. "They were beginning to creak but they would have gone on for a while. It's fair to say if XP wasn't going out of life, we probably wouldn't be doing this now," Barking and Dagenham general manager IT Sheyne Lucock said. Around one-eighth of corporate Windows XP users are moving away from Microsoft, according to recent Tech Pro Research. Lucock said it had become clear that the local authority was locked into a regular Windows operating system refresh cycle that it could no longer afford. "If we just replaced all the Windows desktops with newer versions running a newer version of Windows, four years later we would have to do the same again and so on," he said. "So there was an inclination to try and do something different - especially as we know that with all the budget challenges that local government is going to be faced with, we're going to have to halve the cost of our ICT service over the next five years." Barking and Dagenham outsourced its IT in December 2010 to Elevate East London, which is a joint-venture between the council and services firm Agilisys. Lucock and systems architect Rupert Hay-Campbell are responsible for strategy, policy

Meanwhile, some organizations missed the end of life deadline and are now paying Microsoft for extended support. E.g., the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which is still running 58,000 desktops on WinXP. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/irs-another-windows-xp-laggard-will-pay-microsoft-for-patches/

Great story that is at the center of a new cloud computing platform. I met David Flynn back when he was first demonstrating the Realmsys flash card. Extraordinary stuff. He was using the technology to open a secure Linux computing window on an operating Windows XP system. The card opened up a secure data socket, connecting to any Internet Server or Data Server, and running applications on that data - while running Windows and Windows apps in the background. Incredible mesh of Linux, streaming data, and legacy Windows apps. Everytime I find these tech pieces explaining Fusion-io though, I can't help but think that David Flynn is one of the most decent, kind and truly deserving of success people that I have ever met. excerpt: "Apple is spending mountains of money on a new breed of hardware device from a company called Fusion-io. As a public company, Fusion-io is required to disclose information about customers that account for an usually large portion of its revenue, and with its latest annual report, the Salt Lake City outfit reveals that in 2012, at least 25 percent of its revenue - $89.8 million - came from Apple. That's just one figure, from just one company. But it serves as a sign post, showing you where the modern data center is headed. 'There's now a blurring between the storage world and the memory world. People have been enlightened by Fusion-io.' - Gary Gentry Inside a data center like the one Apple operates in Maiden, North Carolina, you'll find thousands of computer servers. Fusion-io makes a slim card that slots inside these machines, and it's packed with hundreds of gigabytes of flash memory, the same stuff that holds all the software and the data on your smartphone. You can think of this card as a much-needed replacement for the good old-fashioned hard disk that typically sits inside a server. Much like a hard disk, it stores information. But it doesn't have any moving parts, which means it's generally more reliable. It c

A must-read. The major danger is that the the Senate could pass the USA Freedom Act, which has already been passed by the House. Passage of that Act, despite its name, would be bad news for civil liberties.  Now is the time to let your Congress critters know that you want them to fight to the Patriot Act provisions expire on May 31, without any replacement legislation.  Keep in mind that Section 502 does not apply just to telephone metadata. It authorizes the FBI to gather without notice to their victims "any tangible thing", specifically including as examples "library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, tax return records, educational records, or medical records containing information that would identify a person." The breadth of the section is illustrated by telephone metadata not even being mentioned in the section.  NSA going after your medical records souand far fetched? Former NSA technical director William Binney says they're already doing it: "Binney alludes to even more extreme intelligence practices that are not yet public knowledge, including the collection of Americans' medical data, the collection and use of client-attorney conversations, and law enforcement agencies' "direct access," without oversight, to NSA databases." https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/05/seeing-the-stasi-through-nsa-eyes/ So please, contact your Congress critters right now and tell them to sunset the Patriot Act NOW. This will be decided in the next few days so the sooner you contact them the better. 

"Opt out of PRISM, the NSA's global data surveillance program. Stop reporting your online activities to the American government with these free alternatives to proprietary software." A designer named Peng Zhong is so strongly opposed to PRISM, the NSA's domestic spying program, that he created a site to educate people on how to "opt out" of it. According to the original report that brought PRISM to public attention, the nine companies that "participate knowingly" with the NSA are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Zhong's approach is to replace your workflow with open-source tools that aren't attached to these companies, since they easily stay off the government's radar. If you want to drop totally off the map, it'll take quite a commitment.   Are you ready to give up your operating system?  The NSA tracks everything on Windows, OSX and Google Chrome.  You will need to switch to Debian or some other brand of GNU Linux!  Like Mint!!!!! Personally I have switched from Google Chrome Browser to Mozilla Firefox using the TOR Browser Bundle - Private mode.

"Brussels, 16 September 2015 The European Commission has approved its proposal for a new and transparent system for resolving disputes between investors and states - the Investment Court System. The Investment Court System would replace the existing investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism in all ongoing and future EU investment negotiations, including the EU-US talks on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)."

"Here is why people don't like Ubuntu Software Center The majority opinion in the Ubuntu community seems to be that the Ubuntu Software Center is a terrible piece of software and that it needs to be replaced or fixed urgently. We compiled a list of reasons why users don't like the application and why they think Canonical should really consider a change."

The "Chromeless" project experiments with the idea of removing the current browser user interface and replacing it with a flexible platform which allows for the creation of new browser UI using standard web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I was wrong. This page is the hub for Sun Blackbox containerized data center. Check the link titles to press coverage on the Perspectives page and you begin to get an idea why IBM was so desperate to force a hardware deal with Sun and Microsoft. Sun and Microsoft are ripping out and replacing IBM's hardware business.

First of all, I modified the approach by replacing # with ¶ per the suggestion of another Simon. Whereas # suggests Web anchors, it only suggests that to Web hacks, while ¶ has a long typographical history as a paragraph marker. Plus, it's kind of pretty and it's officially called a Pilcrow, which you gotta love. Now that the anchor is so evanescent, I wonder if it might work in a shade slightly less ethereally pale. ¶

Excellent commentary from Nova Spivak; about as well thought out a discussion as i've ever seen concerning the future of the desktop. Nova sees the emergence of a WebOS, most likely based on JavaScript. This article set off a fire storm of controversy and discussion, but was quickly lost in the dark days of late August/September of 2008, where news of the subsequent collapse of the world financial system and the fear filled USA elections dominated everything. Too bad. this is great stuff. ..... "Everything is moving to the cloud. As we enter the third decade of the Web we are seeing an increasing shift from native desktop applications towards Web-hosted clones that run in browsers. For example, a range of products such as Microsoft Office Live, Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, DabbleDB, Basecamp, and many others now provide Web-based alternatives to the full range of familiar desktop office productivity apps. The same is true for an increasing range of enterprise applications, led by companies such as Salesforce.com, and this process seems to be accelerating. In addition, hosted remote storage for individuals and enterprises of all sizes is now widely available and inexpensive. As these trends continue, what will happen to the desktop and where will it live?" .... Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today? ..... The desktop of the future is going to be a hosted web service ..... The Browser is Going to Swallow Up the Desktop ...... The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention ...... Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders. ...... The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence ....... The desktop of the future is going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in ....... Interactive shared spaces will replace folders ....... The Portable Desktop ........ The Sma

ptsefton continues his rant that OpenOffice does not support the Open Web. He's been on this rant for so long, i'm wondering if he really thinks there's a chance the lords of ODF and the OpenOffice source code are listening? In this post he describes how useless it is to submit his findings and frustrations with OOo in a bug report. Pretty funny stuff even if you do end up joining the Michael Meeks trek along this trail of tears. Maybe there's another way?

What would happen if pt moved from targeting the not so open OpenOffice, to target governments and enterprises trying to set future information system requirements?

NY State is next up on this endless list. Most likely they will follow the lessons of exhaustive pilot studies conducted by Massachusetts, California, Belgium, Denmark and England, and end up mandating the use of both open standard "XML" formats, ODF and OOXML.

The pilots concluded that there was a need for both XML formats; depending on the needs of different departments and workgroups. The pilot studies scream out a general rule of thumb; if your department has day-to-day business processes bound to MSOffice workgroups, then it makes sense to use MSOffice OOXML going forward. If there is no legacy MSOffice bound workgroup or workflow, it makes sense to move to OpenOffice ODF.

One thing the pilots make clear is that it is prohibitively costly and disruptive to try to replace MSOffice bound workgroups.

What NY State might consider is that the Web is going to be an important part of their informations systems future. What a surprise. Every pilot recognized and indeed, emphasized this fact. Yet, they fell short of the obvious conclusion; mandating that desktop applications provide native support for Open Web formats, protocols and interfaces!

What's wrong with insisting that desktop applciations and office suites support the rapidly advancing HTML+ technologies as well as the applicat

Reverse engineering the MS Office SharePoint Protocol: CMSwire has a good review of Alfresco's latest feature, the repurposing of MSOffice as an editing and collaboration front end for the Alfresco Open Web Content Management System.
Microsoft ha sof course been very busy re-purposing MSOffice as a front end editor - shared collaboration space for their own MOSS WebStack - CMS. Thanks to the EU, Microsoft was forced to publicly disclose integration and interop methods used to wire together MOSS. Alfresco seized the disclosure to create their own re-purposing.
IMHO, this is exactly how the Microsoft monopoly needs to be cracked. Instead of replacing MSOffice at great cost and disruption to business users, tap into the same re-purposing methods Microsoft uses as they try to shift that monopoly center from the desktop to a proprietary MS Web.
"... The Office SharePoint Protocol is one of the big achievements that Alfresco has come out with to sell Alfresco Share as a true viable alternative to SharePoint in the enterprise....
"... Microsoft Office is still the most widely used productivity suite in organizations today. That's a huge reason why SharePoint has been so successful - Microsoft created a protocol to enable Office to interact directly with SharePoint. This means you don't have to leave the discomfort of our Office application to create, edit and manage documents and calendar events in SharePoint." For Alfresco, the break came when Microsoft released a number of technical specifications to the public (including the spec for SharePoint 2007) in the name of interoperability. Alfresco used this information to implement the Office and SharePoint protocols as a compatible server - thus the same functionality users get working between Office and SharePoint, they can now also get natively with Office and Alfresco.

Good article discussing the rapid advance of a WebOS for Web Applications based on the WebKit JavaScript model. Author focuses on Apple's SproutCore - Object C framework, but provides a very broad scope of discussion. Interesting stuff concerning the relationship between JavaScript, the SproutCore Framework, and Ruby. I found the link to this at the ReadWriteWeb story, "The Future of the Desktop" ........ "Desktop web applications offer the convenience of desktop applications and the interconnected power of web applications. This article looks at what they are, how they may evolve and focuses on Sproutcore, an open source framework for building them: The Internet is still evolving and the familiar struggle over who will control the platform of future web applications is still ongoing. Companies like Microsoft and Adobe provide platforms that build slick web applications but their aim is to dominate with proprietary systems that will effectively replace the browser. On the other side you have Google and Apple who have developed or support open web standards for developing web applications. If the proprietary companies win, future web applications could be locked into their systems and the incredible innovation that has driven the web to date may begin to falter.

The question that seems more important than all the rest is "Can I afford to switch vendors?" Let's consider some examples. When printers wear out, you can buy new printers from whoever with little concern for switching cost. If you're unhappy with your current servers, you can replace them with models from lots of vendors (Sun, Dell, HP, IBM, others) without worrying too much about compatibility (well, you may have some racking and cabling pain); the issues are price, performance, and support. If you're grouchy about your OS, you can move between *n*x flavors like Debian, SUSE, and Solaris pretty freely in most (granted, not all) cases; with maybe some deployment and sysadmin pain. If you're unhappy with your desktop environment, well too bad, you're stuck. Your users are too deeply bought into some combination of Outlook calendaring and Excel macros and Sharepoint collab. The price of rebuilding the whole environment is simply too high for most businesses to consider. If you're unhappy with your Oracle licensing charges, you probably have to suck it up and deal with it. SQL is a good technology but a lousy standard, offering near-zero interoperability; the cost of re-tooling your apps so they'll run on someone else's database is probably unthinkable. Like they say, you date your systems vendor but you marry Larry Ellison.

This is a must see discussion!!!! Especially if you've seen the Ted Nelson series of talks at Google. (Ted Nelson invented Hypertext, and continues to promote the XANDU view of highly graphical and interactive computing based on an advanced "digital" document model). Jen-Hsu fully embraces the sugarplum document model, dissing i a gentle way the legacy of x86 text-number processing designed to replace typewritters and calculators to produce the same printed document.

Nvidia has also announced an ION based board optimized for the Google Android Mobile-Telecommunications OS!

I've pretty much stayed out of the EU action against Microsoft primarily because it misses the mark by so much. The browser is not the means by which Microsoft seeks to create a Web based monopoly. MSIE is a useful tool used to frustrate Web developers and systems providers, but we are way beyond the point where removing/replacing MSIE becomes an effective remedy to Microsoft monopolist abuses. Way beyond! There is however no doubt in my mind that the browser is going to be the portable WebOS of the future. The problem is that browser runtimes are also host for proprietary runtime plug-ins. Like MS Silverlight! Read on freind. My comments are three part, and posted down the line, somewhere around 183. Heavy on the WebKit stuff as usual! Look for "gary.edwards".

The race is on. Google will win the consumer Web. Microsoft will win the business Web. Sadly i don't think there is any way for Google to challenge Microsoft with regard for the privilege of transitioning existing MSOffice bound workgroup- workflow business processes to the Web. Even if Google Docs could match MSOffice feature to feature, cracking into existing MSOffice workgroups is impossibly hard. Anyone who doubts this ought to take a second look at the Massachusetts ODF Pilot Study, or the recently released Belgium Pilot results. Replacing MSOffice in a workgroup setting is simply too disruptive and costly because of the shared business process problem.

"What's good for the Internet is good for Google, and the company says its strategic proposition for the newly introduced Chrome browser is: a better platform is needed to deliver a new generation of online applications......." This is one of the best explanations of why Google had to do Chrome i've seen thus far. Kontra also provided some excellent coverage concerning the Future of the Web in a two part article previously published. Here he nails the RiA space, comparing Google Chrome, Apollo (Adobe AiR/Flex/Flash) and Microsoft Silverlight. Chrome is clearly an Open Web play. Apollo and Sivlerlight are proprietary bound in some way. Although it must be said that Apollo implements the SAME WebKit layout engine / WebKit docuemtn model as Google Chrome, Apple Safari-iPhone, Nokia, RiM and the Iris "Smart Phone" browser. The WebKit model is based on advanced HTML, CSS, SVG and JavaScript. Where Adobe goes proprietary is in replacing SVG with the proprietary SWF. The differences between JavaScript and ActionScript are inconsequential to me, especially given the problems at Ecma. One other point not covered by Kontra is the fact that Apollo and Silverlight can run as either browser plugins or standalone runtimes. Wha tthey can't do though is run as sufing browsers. They are clearly for Web Applications. Chome on the other hand re-invents the browser to handle both surfing mode AND RiA. Plus, a Chrome RiA can also run as a plugin in other browsers (Opera and FireFox). Very cool. The last point is that i wouldn't totally discount Apple RiA. They too use WebKit. The differnece is tha tApple uses the SquirrelFish JavaScript JiT with the SproutCore-Cocoa developers framework. This approach is designed to bridge the gap between the OSX desktop/server Cocoa API, and the WebKit-SproutCore API. Chrome uses the V8 JiT. And Adobe uses Tamarin to compile JavaScript-ActionScript. Tamarin was donated to the Mozilla community. If there is anythin that will s