We would rather be ruined than changed

About 2 years ago I wrote a piece called Five things that Desktop Linux really needs, attempting to air out my five biggest grievances with Desktop Linux. If you follow FOSS news, every year is heralded as “The Year of the Linux Desktop,” although such a thing clearly hasn’t happened yet. Now, two years later, [...]

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§2078 · June 20, 2008 · 7 comments · Tags: , , , , , ,


Eh. It’s good, I suppose, and I’m sure its much-vaunted performance is there, but this is very much a service pack dealing with O/S guts, and not a massive feature pack a la SP2. I can’t immediately tell any difference. In other news, Hardy Heron is released! And its software is already out of date.

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§2050 · April 29, 2008 · 2 comments · Tags: , , , ,


I love Jeff Atwood’s blog, and can even accept that he’s drank of the Microsoft Kool-Aid seemingly for both desktop and server because he’s a great writer and a great programmer. But I admit to being troubled by his recent post. I might think it to be an April Fool’s Day joke, except the post [...]

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§2031 · April 4, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: , , ,


After a number of delays, OpenOffice 2.4.0 has been officially released. Get it here. Check the mirrors for your own OS and localization. OpenOffice 2.4.0 has not quite been released yet. Some major new features include OpenGL transitions for Impress, some major charting improvements for Calc, and block selection for Writer.

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§2022 · March 25, 2008 · 4 comments · Tags: , , , ,


Just a few days ago, I compared the relative sizes of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) and OASIS’s OpenDocument format (ODF). I noticed that while OOXML was smaller for smaller amounts of text, ODF was smaller for larger documents. I was curious as to the turning point for this curve, which I hypothesize has to [...]

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§1985 · February 15, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , ,


Every so often, I dink around with benchmarking common lossless compressors. One of the best sites for it is, I think, Werner Bergman’s Maximum Compression, which is a rather comprehensive running benchmark of just about every lossless compression benchmark under the sun. Really, there’s a lot. What you have to understand about the world of [...]

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§1954 · January 19, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , , ,