Some truths, benchmarks and formal complaints about Vista 7 and the lies surrounding it

The older I get, the more certain I am that most discussions consist of arguing over half-truths. In fact, the more strongly everyone argues, the more likely that nobody has the complete truth. And nowhere does these hard-won truisms seem more accurate than in the age-old argument over whether the operating system we all live by should be called Linux or GNU/Linux.

In all my years working as a journalist, I've never seen any technology company spin information the way Microsoft did today. The press release on OOXML ratification is a blueprint for spinning semantics, and the stringing together of truths and half-truths to seemingly make the outcome of one event something else altogether.

There is so much new stuff being brought out right now, everything from Google Wave to some very interesting ubunet ubuntu karmic integrations. What is interesting is how costly the first iteration of any idea is, it seems that before an idea is really solid or cohesive you need to spend a lot of time just thinking about what your trying to achieve.

As a (relatively) long time Ubuntu user, occasional bug reporter and support analyst, I often deal with bug reporting and I feel your pain about bug reporting, Matt. This happens in many other free software projects, but I think Ubuntu’s popularity gives its problems more exposure, an opportunity to refine the process and maybe inspire others to learn from its mistakes and success.

One of the reasons free operating systems are so great is because of their bug reporting features. Ubuntu is no exception. Like most other GNU/Linux operating systems, Ubuntu allows users to file bug reports using its bug reporting site, Launchpad. In the free software world, each user becomes a potential beta tester and gets the chance to contribute to the community without ever coding or writing documentation. Unfortunately, Launchpad’s bug reporting tool often scares away users who have no idea what a ticket, project, or distribution is.

've been blogging about OSS for nearly 2 years now. My in-the-trenches experience with OSS goes back to early 2004. The constant drumbeat of "proprietary software is dead, open source is the only path forward" has been deafening at times. I'll admit that I, too, used to espouse similar words. But, I am fortunate enough to work with colleagues who've been in the software industry since day one.

One writer's vision of an error reporting system meant to serve users and not the manufacturer of the system--sparked by Microsoft's unwillingness to speak with him about Windows Error Reporting

The ext3 filesystem supports write barriers which are designed to allow a filesystem to take advantage of a disk’s write cache without fear of compromising the ingetrity of the filesystem on a power failure or kernel panic.