Most of my day is spent in front of the computer. Thus a perfectly functioning machine is of vital importance to me. I do not want to worry about viruses and spyware. I do not want to have to defrag my harddisk every now and then or reboot everytime I install a new application. I do not want to worry about some malicious software.

"Opinion: Is Microsoft just selling the ammo? Or, is Microsoft fighting the wrong war with the wrong weapons?"

Ways of dodging the software patent plague (until it's cured) needn't involve selling out. Yesterday it was shown that Red Hat had paid in vain for software patents that would not be valid anyway. At the time, Red Hat was seen as a courageous patent swatter, but not everyone is happy. Here is quite a legitimate new criticism. (strong language warning)

"I think it is wrong to promote [GNU/Linux] only by its features. To be sold, any product needs to have a unique set of “selling points”. Even if [GNU/Linux] has the unique features U, V, Z , no other OS has, this is not a strong selling point for it, because[...]Our marketing message should invite people to participate to Free Society..."

Last Friday, Sam's Buffer Overflow run-down featured a piece by Walter Koenning discussing why campaigning hard for Linux on the desktop is selling open source -- and the operating system -- short.

It's been a pretty incredible year for open source on the desktop. Dell has started selling some of its PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed, which means that even non-technical users can acquire a low-cost, powerful open source system without needing to worry about installation and handling drivers and suchlike.

After upgrading to Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, I was happy to notice that audio in all applications (including Skype) was finally working perfectly! However, I was less happy to notice that Pulseaudio was using quite a lot of CPU-time, and that the sound quality was absolutely awful... So I decided to give OSS4 a try.

I've been musing on the question of speed and the end of a relationship. Since this is IT we are talking about, let's ask a simple question but on that is difficult to answer: "How do you get folk who are perfectly happy with Windows XP to change to something else?"

Recently, Blue GNU reported that the Xming software is released under the terms of the GNU GPLv2, and that the developer might be violating its terms. Harrison now states his program is no longer under the GPL. So here's an update.