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This is vital information for those of you who understand what the American Stop Online Piracy Act actually means for the sovereignty of the global internet. Go make some coffee, and start this video. By the time the video is done, an hour later, go reheat and actually drink your coffee. I have three words [...]
Posts Tagged ‘open source’
Unpacking the Astrology Vs Computers lawsuit
October 15th, 2011 
Jason Thibeault The title to this post is grossly reductionist, but it amused me. Regardless, I’m not planning on taking on astrology yet again, just the particular astrologers who are engaged in what I view to be a money-grab along the same lines as the now defunct SCO Group.* A company called Astrolabe was founded in 1979, [...]
Posted in Computers, Copyright, Current Events, Pseudoscience 
Tags: Astrolabe, cheating, copyright, legal system, money grab, Olson time zone database, open source, software, tzdata 
18 Comments »Astrologers pick a fight with open-source software and history itself
October 9th, 2011 Jason Thibeault Via a pingback ostensibly made by Astrology-X-Files (and maybe even Curtis Manwaring himself, no less!), this news about Astrolabe at Tech Dirt, where they’ve just filed suit against the maintainers of the public-domain Olson time zone database that is used in just about every open-source time zone related project imaginable:
Posted in Computers, Copyright, Pseudoscience Tags: astrology, computers, legal system, Linux, open source 22 Comments »MS’ duplicitous “olive branch” to Linux is aimed at the backs of our collective skulls
July 25th, 2009 Jason Thibeault Recently, Microsoft got a good deal of press for having open-sourced its Hyper-V drivers for Linux, releasing them under the GPL v2 even. To anyone paying attention to Microsoft’s earlier rhetoric about the GPL being “un-american“, this is surprising news. To those of us who know what’s actually going on underneath the finely crafted patina [...]
The smoking gun that came in the form of a chicken
June 19th, 2009 Jason Thibeault Dana Blakenhorn was at a convention in Taiwan, and after noticing only one device preinstalled with Linux in the whole show, cracked the Asus / Windows / Linux story wide open with one simple question: “what happened to all the Linux?” “In our association we operate as a consortium, like the open source consortium. They [...]
Some Canadian news
May 26th, 2009 Jason Thibeault Here’s quick round-up of a few news tidbits salient to us Canucks. Former PM Brian Mulroney might be lying about his having represented Karlheinz Schreiber’s business interests in a trip he made to China in October 1993. The scandal is that he took three hundred grand from Schreiber to lobby for a project to have [...]
Sony Pictures CEO admits to gross ignorance
May 17th, 2009 Jason Thibeault Via Slashdot: Michael Lynton is a guy who “doesn’t see anything good having come from the internet, period“, because of the piracy that has apparently eaten into his profit margins. I contend that what has eaten into your profit margins is the fact that casual movie-watchers are now better equipped thanks to new technology to [...]
Open-Source Software Shout-Out
May 16th, 2009 Jason Thibeault (OSSSO?) Here’s two great bits of code that’ll never get attribution from my workplace, as they’re being used on internal-facing projects, so I wanted to give them shout-outs here where someone might actually notice. First is a pure DHTML-and-Javascript date picking applet, simple but efficient and well-documented for any beginner Javascript programmers, which I’ll be [...]
One true time I hold to, MySQL will always go on
May 15th, 2009 Jason Thibeault I just quoted Celine Dion. Oh my. On behalf of all of Canada, I apologize for her existence. The prognosis is much less grim than it once might have been for MySQL, in the wake of Sun being bought out by rival database company Oracle. Monty Widenius, who is to MySQL what Linus Torvalds is [...]
Great discussion on incentives and open source software
May 4th, 2009 Jason Thibeault Stephanie Zvan at Almost Diamonds wrote a wonderfully insightful article that cuts through the BS about technical support being better if, and only if, the support comes from a paid drone, as opposed to an unpaid, unclean basement dwelling OSS geek. The topic even spilled over into a flame war at Greg Laden’s house, in [...]
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