etbe

Jeff Bailey writes about the last 26 years of Microsoft [1]. He gives Microsoft credit for “saving us from the TRS 80″, however CP/M-86 was also an option for the OS on the IBM PC [2]. If MS hadn’t produced MS-DOS for a lower price then CP/M would have been used (in those [...]

TED has a post about the design of the new OLPC [1].
I never liked the previous OLPCs [2], for my use a machine needs a better keyboard than the tiny rubber thing that they had. I understand why they designed it that way, for use in places where it would be an expensive asset [...]

I believe that the Red Hat process which has Fedora for home users (with a rapid release cycle and new versions of software but support for only about one year) and Enterprise Linux (with a ~18 month release cycle, seven years of support, and not always having the latest versions) gives significant benefits for the [...]

Mark Shuttleworth has written an interesting post about Ubuntu release dates [1]. He claims that free software distributions are better able to meet release dates than proprietary OSs because they are not doing upstream development. The evidence that free software distributions generally do a reasonable job of meeting release dates (and Ubuntu does [...]

Anthony Towns writes about using an improved version of jigdo to download CD/DVD images [1]. His improvement is basically to pipeline operation for better performance.
Jigdo (the Jigsaw download) is a tool to download a set of files and then use them to create a CD or DVD image [2]. The idea is that [...]

Patrick Winnertz writes about the demotivating effect of unreasonable delays on joining the Debian project [1].
While I agree that things need to be improved in terms of getting people in the project in a timely manner (the suggestion of providing assistants seems good), I don’t think that anyone has a good reason for being demotivated [...]

Uwe Hermann has described how to resize a root filesystem after booting from a live-cd or recovery disk [1]. He makes some good points about resizing an LVM PV (which I hadn’t even realised was possible).
The following paragraph is outdated, see the update at the end:
Incidentally it should be noted that if your root [...]

Albert writes about software development and how much teamwork is used [1]. He makes an interesting clash of analogies by suggesting that it’s not a “team sport” because “its not like commercial fishing where many hands are used to pull in the net at the same time“.
I think that software development for any non-trivial [...]

Steve Kemp writes about security issues with C programs [1]. It seems obvious that if you are going to do something that is overly tricky (such as anything related to setuid programs) then you should have a good knowledge of what you are doing. Steve goes a little further and suggests that anyone [...]

I had an old Compaq Athlon 1GHz system that seemed to be broken. It would display random things on the screen from the BIOS and fail the boot, it looked like a motherboard problem. Fortunately before I gave it away (I give away all my broken machines to members of my local LUG [...]