The Open Source Advocate

When the Dell/Ubuntu deal was first announced, many people speculated on the financial impact to Canonical. The behind-the-scenes details are still not available, but I was able to glean some information from the Dell website as I customized an Ubuntu machine. As you can see below, Dell is selling support contracts through Canonical. They are offering terms ranging from 30 days to 1 year of support. If you compare the Dell prices to the official Canonical support prices , you will find that one year of support costs $250 direct from Canonical, and $275 if you buy it bundled with your Dell machine. I wonder how much of that $275 goes to Dell, and how much goes to Canonical. At first glance, you might guess that the $25 increase could be Dell's cut for selling the support contract for Canonical. But Dell is also going to be providing hardware support, so I expect more than $25 is going to Dell. Even so, I expect the amount of revenue coming to Canonical via Dell will dwarf any ...

Should I use my real identity when communicating on the internet, or should I have a separate online identity? That is the question I have been thinking about as I watch my internet footprint grow with every blog entry, blog comment, forum post, mailing list reply, and IRC chat message. (FYI - IRC chat messages are often logged and posted online.) I do not have a reason to keep my privacy now, but who knows what the future holds? I may have new enemies in the future that I don't want to know personal details about me. Once data is on the internet, it stays on the internet. It is usually impossible to erase your writing from the public domain. I can only think of two options: 1. I can continue to use my real identity, but I must always keep in mind that what I write may be used against me in the future. This can be in the form of a job opportunity, an evil stalker, a political campaign, a business deal, or a lawsuit. 2. Create a new nickname that serves as my online identity. ...

Last December I wrote an article titled " Why can't we watch the news in Linux? " In that article I exposed the problems that Ubuntu 6.10 had with watching video feeds from popular news websites. These problems were not caused by a lack of multimedia support in Ubuntu, instead they were caused by the news companies who designed their sites for Windows-based media players only. Now that Ubuntu 7.04 is out, I wanted to evaluate the progress that has been made by testing these video feeds from the same news websites. ABC News Sound: NO Video: NO BBC News Sound: YES Video: YES (Improvement!) CBS News Sound: NO Video: NO CNBC Sound: NO Video: NO CNN Sound: YES Video: YES (Improvement!) FOX News Sound: YES Video: NO MSNBC Sound: YES Video: YES As you can see, two of the websites have improved their results. This increases the number of working video feeds to 3 out of the 7 websites that I selected for testing. I am not certain if this change can be attributed to improvements...