OSSPACK

While the beta testing seems never to end at Google -- Gmail is still in beta well past age 4 -- the world's largest search engine and advertising machine has released to the public a new knowledge base called"Knol." A"knol," according to Google, is a unit of knowledge. More specifically, Google says Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects

Out in the blogosphere (which we believe is somewhere near "the Internets,") the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner is getting unpacked, photographed, and examined. On Holden Karau's blog, he describes difficulties getting the FreeRunner working with an AT&T SIM card, but dubs the voice quality "pretty awesome."

[Updated: Jul. 17, 2008] -- Excito is shipping a faster version of its low-power, Debian Linux-based file and print server. The quiet-running Bubba Two moves up to a 333MHz Freescale PowerPC processor, boosts storage to 1TB, and adds dual gigabit Ethernet ports, providing router support.

Wind River has announced a test automation framework aimed at streamlining the software quality assurance process for embedded Linux developers. Wind River Test Management (WRTM) enables development teams to plan and execute tests, perform fact-based analysis, and rapidly resolve testing issues, says the company.

Dell is now selling selected systems with Ubuntu 8.0.4, Hardy Heron, pre-installed in the United Kingdom . Ubuntu has been an option some Dell systems in the past, but only in the United States. Dell is pre-installing Ubuntu on the XPS M3110 and Inspiron 1525n laptops and the Inspiron 530n desktop system.

It looks like as of July 7th, this blog had an anniversary. I’ve kept several blogs and sites over the years, but this one is by far the longest I’ve had one in operation. I really think that it’s due to me finding the openSUSE project.

I’ve always had a desire to help out with open source projects in some way and the openSUSE community kickstarted that for me. Thanks to the whole community for keeping me active and thanks to the readers for skimming my crazy rants and raves.

I almost wish I had some of my old site backups, it would be interesting to read over some old posts. I’m going to dig through some dusty external drives to see if I can’t bring back some old material.

Thanks again, and happy anniversary altbit.org!

You could probably power a small island with all of these. Oh wait, we are! A rather large number of our favourite iconic green laptops will be charging on these surge-protected power boards very soon.

Pia will land in Niue next week, as one member of an elite team tasked with kickstarting the world’s first 100% saturation deployment of OLPCs. Of course, it helps that Niue is a tiny island nation in the middle of the Pacific!

Denver Post: "Just four days after escaping a federal minimum-security work camp, "Spam King" Eddie Davidson shot his wife and child and wounded a teen-age girl before turning the gun on himself."

The best systems administrators are set apart by their efficiency. And if an efficient systems administrator can do a task in 10 minutes that would take another mortal two hours to complete, then the efficient systems administrator should be rewarded (paid more) because the company is saving time, and time is money, right?