August 5th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Readers of The Diamond Age and viewers of Star Trek: The Next Generation are familiar with the idea of replicators. Indeed, architects and product designers have been working them into their design and rapid prototyping processes already, yet the home market is still nascent.
A big step in making replicators as ubiquitous as personal computers was taken by tinkerers Adrian Bowyer and Vik Olliver when they built the RepRap, a rapid-prototyper capable of replicating itself.
A particularly great feature of their work is the licensing model they have chosen: open source. Their stated goal is “to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500). That way it’s accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can make another and give it to a friend…”
This is going to be extraordinary!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on RepRap: Open Source Meets Hardware
August 4th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
I love to see the cross-pollination of ideas between open source projects, and the clever ways they can be adapted from one paradigm to another.
For example, recent versions of OpenOffice.org have become more like web browsers, especially Firefox, as OOo introduced its Extensions features, as developers have worked to provide wiki-capabilities, and now, as a new extension called Last Session allows you to reopen OOo and have all your previous documents open for you with one click, just like I’ve become accustomed to with Firefox’s session restore.
Last Session is something I had a distinct need for, and I look forward to making good use of it starting immediately.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice Extensions: Last Session
August 1st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Two great news bites from Firefox in the past few days:
As recently predicted, Firefox’s browser use share has surpassed 20%, while IE has dropped below 70% and continues its gradual demise.
TG Daily writes, “According to the most recent data made available by the market research firm [NetApplications] today, Internet Explorer stands at 69.88% today, while Firefox 2 and 3 account for a combined market share of 20.68% (Firefox 2: 13.75%, Firefox 3: 6.92%.)”
The second is that Firefox will soon support the HTML 5 media elements, which means native support for Theora video and Vorbis audio in the browser, with no plugins. These are open formats like HTML itself, free from the control and maneuverings of any single company. When these catch on, we’ll hopefully see them replace Flash video (too CPU intensive) and broaden free access to open media on the web.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Firefox Achieves 20% Share, Free Video Codec Support Coming
July 30th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Gregdek writes a post to reassure the world of the strength of the relationship between OLPC and Fedora, and to point out that despite news mentions of Windows forcing its way onto OLPCs, that has not happened yet in the real world:
“OLPC has shipped over 300,000 units to kids around the world. They plan to ship at least another 50,000 more each month, and very likely more than that. It’s entirely possible that by the end of 2008, there will be a million OLPC systems deployed worldwide.
“Of those systems, 100% of them currently run Fedora, and 0% of them currently run Windows — despite the press clippings you may have read.
“The OLPC project is based on Fedora. The engineers at OLPC have invested thousands of person-hours in making Fedora a successful base for OLPC deployments. Fedora is now, and will continue to be, the base operating system for the OLPC project. Period.”
300,000 units distributed is a large number, but it hasn’t impressed the media as much as I would have expected. Nevertheless, I expect growth to continue at a healthy rate, especially as we see successes coming from the current adopters, and over time the project will come to receive its due recognition.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC and Fedora’s Strong Relationship
July 29th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
OpenOffice has won in three categories at the Sourceforge 2008 Community Choice Awards!
This puts it far ahead of any other single project, reflecting the open source community’s understanding of the strategic importance of an open source, open standards-based office suite. This product category, after all, is where Microsoft continues to earn billions of dollars it funnels into attacks on every other open source program and project, as well as stymieing efforts to create true open standards and level playing fields.
Before I get carried away, what were the three categories? They were: Best Project, Best Project for the Enterprise, and Best Project for Educators.
I would have to agree!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org Wins Three Sourceforge Awards
July 28th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
In 2007, Macedonia implemented a program to put computers in all its schools, and for price and performance reasons, chose Ubuntu as the operating system for the project. This has led to a high level of literacy in Ubuntu and related open source programs not only in schools, but among the country’s population generally.
Aid Worker Daily provides a snapshot of the current level of Ubuntuphilia in Macedonia, and the positive side effects the school migration is having for the entire population.
“A few weeks ago, while my wife was still in Macedonia, I asked her to install Ubuntu on our old laptop which her parents had been using for years, primarily for Skype. The machine had contracted a bug and I am not a fan of bootleg software. With the popularity of Ubuntu it was easy enough to find someone to handle the installation (the neighbor) and within 24 hours she was back up and running. It seems as if everyone in Macedonia keeps a copy of the ISO in their back pocket.”
And then, he blows apart the argument that Linux is hard to use. His father-in-law had never used the laptop before, either running Windows or Linux: “Shortly after returning to the States my wife called her father and asked him if he had a minute so that she could explain to him how to get online. His response was, “Don’t worry about it. I figured it out on my own.”
It has long been my opinion that Ubuntu (and most other modern Linux distros) are more logical and usable than Windows, and here is another anecdotal confirmation of that.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Ubuntu and Macedonia
July 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
We all know the release of Firefox 3 was a huge success, with the attempt to win a Guinness World Record for downloads having been achieved.
But how has it been doing since? One of my favorite sources for open source statistics, XiTi Monitor, analyzes Firefox 3 adoption since its release.
In short, not only are Firefox 2 users upgrading very rapidly, but the Firefox family of browsers continues to gain on its main rival. Its pan-European average usage rate ranges from about 32% on weekdays to over 35% on weekends, and continues to grow each quarter.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on XiTi Monitor on Firefox 3’s Growth
July 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
A 2008 International Design Excellence Award was given to the OLPC XO laptop in honor of its hardware, software interface, and overall project design.
Ryan Eder, on behalf of the contest, explains: “Brilliant design for an even better cause. From the physical design to the sociological impact, every element of this laptop is exemplary of true innovation. This product is immensely practical and beneficial to all users across the globe. Design at its best!”
I imagine that as it receives more exposure and real-world use, OLPC will continue to collect accolades like today’s IDEA award.
Posted in Free Culture, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC XO Receives Design Award
July 22nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Adeona is a free and open source tool for recovering a lost or stolen laptop. Install it on your computer and then if your laptop disappears, you can track where (IP address and location) it is being used and work to recover it.
It also works hard to maintain your privacy on an ongoing basis:
“Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.”
Developed by two University of Washington Ph.D. students, this is a great tool to keep in your kit.
Posted in Open Source | 2 Comments »
July 21st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Hehe2.net writes a preview of new OOo features in OpenOffice.org 3.0: What to Expect?
The features it covers are probably well-known to readers of this blog, but it includes good screenshots and a great deal of enthusiasm (using far more exclamation points than even I do):
“If you thought 2.4 was major release, then you have seen nothing! Come September, OpenOffice.org will release it’s 3.0 version! That must be quite a big jump!”
The author likes multiple-pages view, the new notes feature, Mac OS X support, Calc’s user interface improvements, tables in Impress, PDF import, and the Presenter Screen extension.
As I, the author is quite pleased with this upgrade:
“OpenOffice 3.0 is a major milestone for the project, there are tons of other new features. I also noticed a great improvement in speed, which has always a bane in previous OpenOffice.org versions.
“If you can’t wait until September, why don’t you download the beta version and try it out, so far it has been very much stable for me. You can download OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta here.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Another OpenOffice 3.0 Preview