UK newspapers are famous for headline's being deceptive

Actually, I've seen many that have only the most tenuous connection (if even that) to either the story or reality itself. This one isn't bad, but it's still misleading:

Tories 'demand and like' spending cuts, says Clegg

What he actually said was that some Tory voters might demand and like the spending cuts. If that statement is enough to strain the coalition further, that unquestionably true statement, then the government will likely fall within the year (and the fixed-term parliament bill won't save it: votes of no confidence remain, only there will be a 14 day grace period for a new government to be formed before an election is triggered. That government must have a majority willing to vote confidence in it). British Conservatives aren't the anti-government fanatics today's Republicans are (or pretend to be), but I'm sure a sizable portion of their staunch supporters are "shrink the government" types who would want to cut the government even if it possessed a magic tree that grew money for free without any taxation.

Wow. An episode of FLOSS Weekly that's interesting!

Usually they just talk about some random incredibly-niche open source project that almost no one even in the open source world is interested in with someone involved in the project. This time they don't have a guest and so (glory of glories!) they're actually just chatting about current events in the open source world, including products I use or am actually interested in using. Amazing.

Ugh. Microsoft to buy Skype

I wonder how long it will take them to kill the Linux version. And quite possibly ruin the product. At least there are alternatives.

Ubuntu aims for 200m users. Good luck with that

If tablet PCs take off, then they might be decently positioned to do that since that's what Unity seems designed for (as many Slashdotters have pointed out). That's incredibly unlikely to happen. Tablet PCs have been around for a long, long time and went nowhere. The iPad is successful because it isn't a tablet PC; it's a tablet, period, in other words a giant smart phone running a modified smart phone OS on an ARM chip. Does anyone really want to run Ubuntu, a desktop OS, on an ARM-based tablet? Doubtful.

The death of GNOME 2 and the move to Unity is really making me really resent KDE's permanent obtuseness when it comes to drag 'n' drop (i.e., forcing the user to choose what to do with a file every blasted time instead of moving it if its within a filesystem like all sane UIs do). I guess I'll give XFCE a try when I'm forced for upgrade my current system.

First a swingstate, now a bellwether: are they nuts?

Virginia as a bellwether of Obama's reelection chances? You've got to be kidding me. Obama was only the second Democrat to carry Virginia in over fifty years. Unlike California's switch to solid blue with the 1992 election, this was a fluke. Maybe if Obama has a small landslide reelection he'll take Virginia too mainly  on the strength of black turnout, but otherwise it's going Republican in 2012 whether Obama gets reelected or not.

Two Ways to Get RSS feeds for Twitter Timelines

It is really a shame that Twitter removed the ability to subscribe to an individual users timeline RSS feed on the page (either through a button on the page or through metadata that produces the RSS icon in the address bar). Here's a pessimistic blog post on what this forebodes for the future of RSS. The good thing is that the feeds still work and there are fairly painless ways to find them:

1. Use "Add a Subscription" in Google Reader and paste in the old-style address of the user's profile page. To get the old-style url, just remove the slash-shebang (/#!) from the current url (e.g., http://twitter.com/#!/isaachummel becomes http://twitter.com/isaachummel).


2. Search for the person's twitter handle in Google Reader. The feed should appear even if no one has ever subscribed to it (way to go Google Reader!). To find the feed search feature in Google Reader, select Browse for Stuff and then click on search at the top of the page. Or just click this link.


3. Follow this blog post's instructions.

 

Anti-evolution proposal makes mockery of science

It is only one guy's submission, so maybe it's not time to get too excited (yet), but this is still stunning:

One submission has come from a company called International Databases, LLC. It's a one-man operation run by Stephen Sample, who says he has a degree in evolutionary biology and taught at the high school and junior college levels for 15 years.

The material he submitted consists of eight modules dealing with current issues in biology and ecology. Most are well within the mainstream scientific consensus. But there are two that deal with the origin of life. Those sections say the "null hypothesis" is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case.

That makes a mockery of the scientific method (and half-way decent theology too). The null hypothesis is not "a wizard did it" (I'm not mocking religion here: he said the intelligence is not necessarily God). If that had been the baseline, modern western civilization would not have come into being (and you wouldn't have a computer or electronic device to read this on). The null hypothesis is simply that that theory is not true.

Tim Pawlenty has proven not to be a serious candidate

I think he just shot his presidential campaign squarely in the head by appearing in this circus. Not a single one of them were ever serious contenders for the 2012 election (I'd never even heard of Herman Cain before). You know you shouldn't have agreed to attend a debate when heroin and hookers become the focus of press attention.

To the Paulites: look, I like Ron Paul as much as the next guy (well, as much as the next guy who thinks he's crackpot, but the kind of crackpot that every legislative body ought to have a few of!), but he's about as likely to be president or even be nominated as Dennis Kucinich.

Ah, the joys of instant news

I thought this headline was peculiar:



 

This sort of thing used to happen a lot in the print world too, though. It still does from time to time, of course. Fortunately, now it can be fixed instantly. When I clicked through, the headline was normal.

New Links

I've added a bevy of new links to the sidebar (if you can't see it, click on Home in the top bar). They are mainly various Open Source resources, including the unofficial LibreOffice web forums, which considering The Document Foundations unwillingness to provide a web forum itself, is something that the LibreOffice community should support. Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.) users had to create their own web forums too in the form of mozillaZine.

Giganews sued

The lawsuit looks like bull to me (admittedly based on a TorrentFreak article), but this isn't exactly shocking. Giganews, and pretty much all other massive bandwidth Usenet providers, real business is helping users pirate content, though done in a way that still provides them safe harbor cover. Come on, anyone with any plan beyond the $4.99 plan is going to be used for binaries (and I'd be shocked into catatonia if they were getting most of their money from that plan), and what binary files would anyone want to download from Usenet? It's an incredible kludgy way to share files. The answer is: things that would get taken down or get you sued if they were distributed over less complicated and error-prone channels, i.e., pirated material (and porn, but the most of that is pirated too).

Look, any attempt to shut them down or hold them responsible would set a horrible precedent that would have a chilling effect on Internet freedom for years to come, but let's call a spade a spade.

Rental store installed spyware on laptop

It even took pictures through the webcam without the renters knowledge and consent. This really is an outrageous invasion of privacy, whatever the justifications offered. Looks like my mother wasn't being excessively cautious when she asked me to physically disable her rented laptop's camera (I cut out a piece of black paper from an envelope and taped it over the camera using transparent tape).

Steve Gibson said a little while ago on Security Now being recorded right now that laptop camera's ought to have a physical shutter that the user must open and close manually. I second that. But what about the microphone? Would a shutter work for that or is that something no one can fix without cracking the laptop case? It doesn't seem that the microphone was used in this case--maybe that would've broken wiretapping laws--but built-in microphones are even more of a privacy risk both inherently and because they are harder to completely thwart.

New Yahoo Mail

Spending a few minutes on it, I think it's an improvement. It has all the new features you've come to expect from Yahoo Mail but finally looks un-OddPosty and like a more conventional webmail service. It's a good fusion. The ads are also less obnoxious than before, bringing Yahoo to the same level as the new Hotmail (though both are still quite obnoxious--AdBlocker is still justified IMHO).

I'm still sticking with Gmail, though, for a plethora of reasons. My backup mail, also, will continue to be Hotmail, mainly because Yahoo continues to lack one crucial feature: the ability to keep HTTPS on throughout the session. This is particularly important because I like to POP all my Gmail to my backup account and I'm not about to send my Gmail password over plaintext.

Whither OpenOffice?

Now that Oracle has (after the introduction of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation) decided to make OpenOffice a community-based project, what will happen in the world free StarOffice derivatives? I can see three possibilities:

1. OpenOffice successfully transfers to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice is merged back into OpenOffice under the OpenOffice name. I strongly suspect that The Document Foundation would undergo major changes in that case.


2. OpenOffice becomes its own successful project. In that case, LibreOffice and The Document Foundation die on the vine. Not only would the advantage of the OpenOffice name be nearly insurmountable, the LibreOffice community is mired in excessive open source zeal and geek elitism (the bitter opposition by a large segment of said community to the introduction of web forums--because "mailing lists are better"--is only one example of that). Reading the LibreOffice lists, one would never guess that the overwhelming majority of OpenOffice downloads are for Windows. Linux comes in third behind Mac OS X and far, far, far behind Windows. And if you think that's just because Linux users have all gone to LibreOffice, think again (web snapshot for June of last year, pre-LibreOffice).


3. Oracle manages to hamstring community-driven OpenOffice somehow. In that case LibreOffice either gets its act together, or it doesn't. If it does, it could supplant OpenOffice. Otherwise, free Star Office-derivatives will languish.

Options 1 and 2 seem the most likely. A fourth possibility is that The Document Foundation receives the OpenOffice brand and decides to kill it. That is too stupid to consider.

Update: A commenter made a good point below about the reliability of the usage statistic:

Your figure for how many people use OpenOffice is bogus. Linux users get their copy of OpenOffice bundled in their distro; they don't need to download it. So unless you throw in all the copies distributed via Linux distros, your figures mean nothing.

Okay, so the ~90% OpenOffice.org for Windows download figure doesn't reflect the overall share of Windows OpenOffice.org. It does still show that there are a huge number of OpenOffice.org Windows users even if we can't be sure how much of the OpenOffice.org install base they represent.