Bristol Wireless will be officially reopening the Computer Room at Windmill Hill City Farm, Philip Street, Bedminster on Thursday 21st October after a brief period of closure. To mark the reopening, we’ll be holding an open access drop-in session from 10am-4pm on that day to encourage new internet users to get online as part of […]
Our friend Alan Lord reminds us that this coming Sunday the date will be 10/10/10. For those that know their binary, you’ll all realise without being prompted that 101010 is 42 in old money, so the day has been declared 42 Day in honour of the late Douglas Adams, author of some rather interesting sci-fi. […]
Tomorrow, 18th September 2010, is Software Freedom Day. Software Freedom Day (SFD) was started by a group of FOSS believers, Matt Oquist, Henrik Omma and Phil Harper with the idea of distributing The OpenCD to everyone. Software Freedom Day is an international event with hundreds of teams from all around the world running local events […]
It’s hard to make out what’s going on with Ubuntu in the increasingly schizophrenic world of Dell, one of the UK’s/world’s largest suppliers of computer equipment. In June the specialist IT press was buzzing with an announcement from Dell that ‘Ubuntu is more secure than Windows’, whilst praising its ‘fast boot-up speeds and elegant design’, […]
Who said the following? Many authorities have found themselves unintentionally locked into proprietary technology for decades. After a certain point that original choice becomes so ingrained that alternatives risk being systematically ignored, no matter what the potential benefits. This is a waste of public money that most public bodies can no longer afford. Strong words, […]
This morning my inbox was graced by an email from the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) headed: ‘Bolzano, please don’t waste your money’. It refers to a recent decision by the Province of Bolzano-Bozen in northern Italy to spend € 2.2 mn. over the next 3 years renewing existing Microsoft proprietary licences and buying new […]
Last week we write about the Ubuntu in Business event being organised in London on 13th July (news passim). News has just arrived via the blog of Canonical, the commercial sponsors of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, that more places have just been made available for the event. According to Canonical’s blog post: Canonical and […]
I wonder if any lawyers read these posts (probably, given your scurrilous style. Ed. 😉 ). If you fit the description of legal eagle, it’s time to take your hands out of somebody else’s pockets and grab some reading matter as Volume 2, No. 1 (2010) of the International Free and Open Source Software Law […]
News has arrived via Twitter (cheers ciderpunx), on the status of the next release of Debian, the distribution upon which other popular distros such as Simply Mepis and Ubuntu (and loads of others too. Ed.) are based and which is used extensively within Bristol Wireless. The Debian release team recently announced the latest status of […]
An intriguing post has appeared on the blog of Sirius Corporation, one of the UK’s foremost open source suppliers. Entitled ‘Open Source: The Capitalists’ Choice‘, Ben Bell, the author, first deals with the typical assumptions made about open source: I often hear people referring to Open Source and Free Software advocates jokingly, or not so […]
The Ubuntu UK community and Canonical, the commercial sponsors of Ubuntu, are currently inviting folk to a very different type of IT event being held on Tuesday, 13th July in London between 1 pm and 5 pm. The venue is The Brickhouse, 152c Brick Lane, London, E1 6RU (map). The nearest Tube station to the […]
One of the joys of this year’s BarnCamp (news passim) was the banter around the campfire in the evening (in some instances the campfire conversation was redolent of this recent xkcd cartoon. Ed.). And for the following we’re indebted to Asterisk enthusiast Naomi for reciting round the flames on Saturday evening: Our father, who art […]
The passing into law of the controversial Digital Economy Act 2010 in the dying days of the last Labour Government focussed plenty of attention on peer-to-peer software (P2P), such as Ktorrent, which is built for the Linux KDE desktop. Indeed as torrent software can be used to download material that infringes copyright (such as illegal […]
Late yesterday evening, the Financial Times (the sporting pink for the casino economy. Ed. 😉 ) reported that search engine giant Google is phasing out the use of Microsoft’s Windows platform for its employees. The policy has been gradually implemented since January, when Google’s Chinese operations were hacked, which Google blames on the lack of […]
Today is the last day to sign up for BarnCamp 2010, which will be staged in the beautiful Wye Valley from 11th to 13th June 2010, courtesy of Hacktionlab, a regular convergence space where activists interested and/or working in the areas of alternative media, renewable energy, online video distribution, free software or any other form […]
The Open Source Observatory and Repository reports that the government of Malta started the Government of Malta Open Source End User Group (Moseug) in April. The group is meant to become a major driving force behind open source initiatives in the country. According to a Times of Malta article on the new user group, written […]
The European Commission has officially published its long-awaited Digital Agenda, outlining its policy plans for the next five years. “While it includes some important building blocks for Free Software, the omission of Open Standards rips a gaping hole in this agenda,” says Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) President Karsten Gerloff. The FSFE welcomes the Commission’s […]
It’s been a while (almost 2 years to the day. Ed.) since we last looked at Gnucash, the personal and small-business software that’s available for free under the GPL for Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows (news passim). Yesterday in the lab, Jules, our treasurer, announced that he’d migrated the Bristol Wireless […]
From Friday 14th to Sunday 16th May 2010, Wikimedia UK will host Wikimedia delegates from around the world who will be meeting in Bristol. This meeting is a three-day summit to discuss technical and strategic issues that cover the work the global Wikimedia Foundation and its national chapters do in relation to the worldwide fundraising […]
Some people may think Twitter trivial (after all, can you say anything meaningful in 140 characters? Ed.), but I find it a great source of news, particularly news I would not otherwise get to hear of, let alone see. One of these is the recent release of Granola, formerly known as Miserware. According to its […]