David Adams Archive

Nintendo Game Cube Linux

The Game Cube Linux project recently released a short tutorial to show how to patch and recompile a vanilla kernel to let it run on your Game Cube. This story at PPC Nerds mentions that fact and a few other tidbits about Linux on gaming consoles. With the gamecube and the future xBox running on PowerPC hardware, all that time spent tinkering with Linux on old Macs may do you some good.

Perpetual vs Subscription Licensing

Software vendors have been moving toward the subscription-type license over the past few years, and away from the perpetual license that had been the norm. Software firms note that companies generally upgrade regularly anyway, so subscription pricing spreads out the payment more easily. A win-win right? But companies don't like the feeling of bing on the hook for payments forever when they once felt like their fee was capped at a certain amount. Read more at PCWorld

Review of “The Last Starfighter: The Musical”

Maybe you have to be a hard-core geek of a certain age to even see the wonderment of such a thing, but Jason Scott, who wrote the review, shares a delightful anecdote about Pac Man at the beginning to establish his credentials. He says that the off-broadway musical based on the 80's cheesy sci-fi movie is great. I just happened to catch The Last Starfighter on HBO a couple weeks ago, and it didn't disappoint my adolescent memories of it.

The FAQs on FAQs

Maintaining and deploying useful FAQs can be a very tedious process. Luckily there are a number of open source FAQ generation and management tools out there that exist to try and make it a bit easier. In The FAQs on FAQs we take a look at some tools and what FAQs demand of administrators.

Linux Distribution Chooser v0.2

There are 100's of different Linux distributions and picking one can be difficult. So (:^tuxs.org) has devised the "Linux Distribution Chooser" to help you find a good distribution to try for the first time. Answer a few simple questions and the "Linux Distribution Chooser" will suggest a Linux distribution for you to try The Distribution Chooser has been now updated to version 0.2 following the feedback from Distrowatch readers.

Kompose’: Full Screen Task Manager for KDE

Kompose' is an Expose'-like (OS X) full screen task manager for KDE that has just gone to release 0.4.1 in two months. You really have to see it to understand, but imagine that tiny little box in your taskbar that indicates all our running windows blown up and on the entire desktop. Then add a tiny screenshot for each app. For those without an OS X box around we have provided these screenshots of Kompose' in action.

Open Sourcing Infoware with Distributed XML

Tim O'Reilly has spoken often over the last year about how to apply the ideals of open source with the slow and eventual shift from dependence on software to dependence on information. The new software is 'infoware'. In Applying Distributed XML toward The Open Source Paradigm Shift to Infoware, I propose that we can preserve the freedoms to innovate with data and to fork infoware by working with locally hosted xml files like we do with RSS.

Thanks, Linux

A Forbes article notes that competition from Linux has spurred Microsoft on to improve its product, lower prices, and spend more attention looking at its sales process. All that effort has resulted in healthy sales for Microsoft's products. It seems that, without a rival, Microsoft gets lazy.