I was looking at some of the Alexa statistics comparing the Alexa traffic ranks for a number of the major community-based news sites over the past three years. The sites in question are Slashdot, Digg, Reddit and Netscape. Although I personally am mostly only familiar with Slashdot, I have heard a lot about the others.
We’ve all heard of the whole “Web 2.0″ phenomenon that has gripped the Internet for the past little while. One of the major outcomes has been the widespread use of so-called “Rich Internet Applications“. These remotely-hosted applications, accessible through a modern Web browser, are claimed to be suitable replacements for existing applications. This is not the case, of course. And to show how it can be very dangerous to depend on these applications, I’d like to recount some events I witnessed several days ago.
As has widely been reported, Ubuntu 7.04 is now available. While I know a great many people use Ubuntu as their primary GNU/Linux distribution, I have usually avoided it as I prefer KDE over GNOME. Because of that preference, I have leaned towards Kubuntu instead. Kubuntu essentially takes Ubuntu, and replaces the GNOME desktop environment with KDE. And when there’s a new version of Ubuntu released, soon after we get a new version of Kubuntu. In this case, that version is Kubuntu 7.04.
Today I was reading an article about the One Laptop per Child project. It suggested that Linux was not a suitable OS to use on such systems. Now, I don’t know whether that is true or not. I’m more interested in what was said in this portion of the post: Don’t get me wrong - I know that stuffing a full version of Windows or OS X on one of these machines is difficult due to the hardware that’s contained within, but with that said, light embedded versions of these products could have been a possibility, and Steve Jobs even offered OLPC free usage of OS X on the laptop!
Over at Slashdot, it’s pretty common for people to comment on a story without having actually looked at any of the pages the story summary links to, let alone read the summary itself. Now I’m not overly familiar with Digg, but I do hear an awful lot about that site. A few of my articles have been submitted there. In any case, I was wondering, do the people at Digg, in general, tend to read the articles they are digging or burying? Or do they blindly dig and bury based on the article title and summary?
Sun’s ZFS is truly a remarkable filesystem. A while back I had read that it was going to be integrated with FreeBSD. And apparently that integration of ZFS into FreeBSD is now essentially complete. I was also reading some time ago that a port of ZFS to DragonFly BSD was being considered. So with Solaris and future releases of FreeBSD supporting ZFS, it’s no doubt in my mind that it will become widely used.
Today I heard about a Linux distribution called Linux Mint. More specifically, I was interested to read about their release of a KDE Edition of their distribution. On the page talking about their KDE edition, they mention the software that is included with their distribution. But something seemed out of place. It took me a moment to realize what it was: … the default Web browser is Firefox 2.0.0.3.
Yesterday I wrote about some of the problems with taking an old PC, installing a system like Linux on it, and trying to use it as a file server. That article generated some interesting discussion. Specifically, it is the first comment by a poster named “techiem2″ that I will be responding to.
Most of us have older PCs that we have little use for. Linux advocates often suggest turning such systems into home data servers. A number of people have written how this can be done, with one recent article suggesting the use of Ubuntu.
One thing I never understood was the idea of a bootloader splash screen. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, there are some examples of such images at this site. While the images are unique and may have some aesthetic appeal, I have always found them to be a hinderance.