OW here’s a company that has so far shown that you can make a lot of money without annoying the community, without doing proprietary stuff (RHEL code is still available if you jump through hoops), and without strutting around in suits, commissioning ‘studies’, and making kitschy adverts.

If you think that Red Hat’s business is plateauing, you’re focusing on the wrong area. It’s not about middleware (e.g. JBoss). Global Desktop is coming next month and Red Hat already has an agreement for deployments (Australia at the least, probably with H-P and other OEMs/ VARs). If Red Hat can do on the desktop what it has done in the server room, then the future is bright for digital independence. Ubuntu (Canonical) also leaves me optimistic.

For the record, this is not “O/S war”. This is not a “my dick is bigger than yours” thing. It’s about freedom, which isn’t the case in an Apple vs. Microsoft debate (both are proprietary and lock-in oriented). Microsoft sees Linux as war and treats it in this way using propaganda (blatantly anti-Free software advertisements). It’s time to demand change.

EB statistics/tracking services share some very encouraging figures which suggest that Netscape and Digg lead the pack of social-driven news sites. As I am active on both sites, I am more than pleased to see this. Some time this weekend I will have submitted my 10,000^th story to Netscape.

Knowing that Netscape attracts roughly 5 million unique users per month, I am certain that my contributions have an impact. They primarily promote digital freedom — something which I passionately believe in and therefore perpetually promote.

Image of Googleplex in London (from ZDNet gallery)

AST night I had my 2^nd interview with google (a *nix systems administration position). What is noteowrthy is that I did not apply for a job. I was contacted by Google owing to my involvement and work on the Web. I am patiently waiting to hear their decision (should take several days), but I am pessimistic. Some questions were really hard and I needed hints. These questions were less analytical than I had expected.

My opinion has just appeared in a CRN article. To quote the relevant bit:

“I have a gripe with what you claim and suggest. Essentially you propose robbing users from choice and diversity. Monocolutre is what GNU/Linux is here to address/tackle. Isn’t that what SLED is for? Corporate uniformity?

Why eliminate all others as contenders? And why spread FUD about compiling packages when there are such huge Ubuntu repositories?”

I referred to the original article in a previous blog post — that which motivated me to address the author. It seems as though, exposure-wise, the sun has begun to shine my way. I received the following E-mail last week (anonymised; anon replaces names/titles).

Hey there Roy,

I bet you’re getting a lot of email these days, thanks to Jason Calacanis’s post. So I’ll be quick.

You probably know anon, thanks to his blog (#36 in the world or thereabouts), his anon venture, and his books like anonand anon. Well, he’s got a new book coming out in August–called anon–which covers anon‘s best blog posts and rants and remarkable ideas of the last decade.

I’ve got a limited number of early books on hand. Any interest in a free copy? No strings attached.

I was shocked to find myself in such honourable position. I hope it’s all sustainable.

must admit that I have fallen in love with the ‘Digg (sub)culture’. And primarily owing to Digg (and its saturation of dynamically-generated pages), the number of hits for my surname is growing at a wild pace across search engines. It is approaching one million in Google (Interesting fact: if I received a penny for every hit that is added to Google, for example, I would be able to make ends meet). This wasn’t intended; rather it’s a side effect that I have just become aware of. I tend to have a consistent username, which is always available due to the small size of my family.

I suspect that, at the moment, Digg boasts over 10 million subscribed members who are largely interested in information technology. Many will be exposed to the virtues of GNU/Linux and Open Source, which seems encouraging to me. At the time of writing, 4 of my submissions appear in the front page, among 15 submissions in total. That’s almost a third of a front page, whose domains’ Alexa traffic rank is among the top 100 sites on the Web. What an overwhelming experience.

have just reached page one of Digg’s top users! This puts me at an excellent position in two separate Web sites: MATLAB Central and Digg, with 20^th and 30^th position, respectively.

With MATLAB I have been for 2 years, but with Digg this was achieved within just 2 months, which seems rather amazing to me. Two months to get there translates to more than one story at the front page, per day, on average. The pace on weekdays stands at approximately 3-4 front page (promoted) items per day, which makes my first rave seem almost insignificant and utterly irrelevant.

VER wondered what a Windows XP clone that is based on Linux would look like? Just follow the link to find out. Apart from various Linux distributions that achieve Windows ‘lookalikiness’ out of the box, there are many extensions too. Regular and long-time Linux users , however, are rarely happy to discover some a new “Start” button for Ubuntu, for instance. And I speak from recent experiences and observations here.

On a related note, KDE is frequently said to imitate Microsoft Windows a little bit too much (design mistakes included). Nevertheless, definitely not in spite my opposition to this claim, I always say that KDE is user-friendly, intuitive, innovative, and comprehensive. It offers me plenty of function that is not available elsewhere. I have just spotted the following ‘fresh-out-of-the-oven’ blog post, which seems to concur with my opinion:

10 Things I Love About KDE

Oh, man, a top ten list. Am I already scraping the bottom of the barrel? Don’t worry, friends. I have several articles on the back burner, but various endeavors are preventing me from completing them. So let’s just run through my favorite desktop environment ever. In no particular order, here are ten things I love about KDE.

(The list in brevity):

1. KIOSlaves

2. Krusader

3. YaKuake

4. Respect

5. KMyMoney

6. KDevelop

7. The Simple Things

8. It’s About Choice Too

9. You Don’t Get Functionality Like This Just Anywhere, You Know

10. Outlook Killer? Okay!