Review: Linux Mint 9 GNOME

Recently, Linux Mint 6 "Felicia" became obsolete. Like any standard Ubuntu release, Linux Mint is supported for 1.5 years after initial release. My installation of Linux Mint 7 "Gloria" will face the same fate in about 5 months. Given that I will leave home for college before that, I wanted to upgrade to a newer version. Due to all of the hubbub over Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala"'s instability upon release, I skipped Linux Mint 8 "Helena" (though the...

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A Few More Days

I am very sorry that I haven't been able to write recently. I was out of town all of last week, but now I am back. I hope to write more in the coming days; then again, I may not be able to do so as I will be even busier over the next few weeks.I'm really excited that this is the last week of school and that I am graduating next week. Go senio...

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Adobe vs. Apple in the Fight for Flash

Recently in the computing world, there has been a back-and-forth argument between Steve Jobs and the developers at Adobe. The dispute, of course, comes as a result of Apple's decision not to support Flash for the iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad.A lot of other people have made remarks about the argument, so what I have to add is very little.Steve Jobs constantly talks about the need for the web to be open. He mentions that Apple does make proprietary products, but continues with the idea that Flash is too proprietary for the web and that a more open...

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A Disappointing Review of Kubuntu 10.04

Before you continue reading, a word of warning: I am sick, so I am not quite in the clearest state of mind. All I am asking is for you to forgive me if my level of writing is not quite up to snuff (which is already at a pretty low level anyway).I am a fan of DistroWatch and try to look for reviews of popular Linux and BSD (and, occasionally, Solaris) distributions. As Ubuntu 10.04 and its derivative distributions came out last week, I wanted to find out if any new reviews had been posted to DistroWatch, as Ubuntu 10.04 was being heralded as a landmark...

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The Failures of Facebook

I was reading a few articles about Facebook's latest privacy scandal recently.Apparently, the Facebook developers were trying to "improve" the privacy features - on Facebook, one can preview how someone else would see one's own profile. However, in doing so, they managed to allow (by accident, of course) anyone to see what any of their friends are doing on Facebook at that moment (including the ability to essentially spy on other people's chats).This is not the first time Facebook has messed up privacy-wise (Facebook is constantly revising privacy...

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Some Sanity from the Mainstream Media on Movie Piracy

This comes from a recent article (Mike Ryan, Yahoo! Movies) about how piracy is affecting box office sales of Iron Man 2.For once, the author (who is probably not a copyright law/tech law junkie; I am not exasperated with this particular author but with mainstream reporters on the subject in general) recognizes that the impact of piracy on box office sales is tiny. The only reason why it is making news is because Paramount has released the film in other countries before releasing it in the US and Canada, so people here will have an even bigger...

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FOLLOW-UP: Arguments Symptomatic of Occasional Linux Community Dysfunction

In my original article on this, I discussed how Canonical's overbearing nature on distributions derived from Ubuntu is causing those developers to move from an Ubuntu base to something else (usually a Debian base).A lot of posts on the actual original article on Mark Shuttleworth's comments remarked that it is only a matter of time before Linux Mint (Ubuntu's most popular derivative distribution) would move away from Ubuntu and towards Debian.Well, folks, I am here to report that these speculations are coming to fruition (at least partly so).Linux...

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Reflection: Linux Mint GNOME

I have been using Linux Mint for exactly one year (as of this day). I thought it would be good to reflect on this year of use.I was preparing for AP exams for the days before. It was a Friday evening, and I was getting a little tired of studying, and the more I thought about it, the more sick I was of Windows. I had been meaning to install Ubuntu for a while but had never gotten the time (or willpower, for that matter) until that day. Also, a few...

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