A bit of stuff | Ugo Abate

Last time I’ve heard about a big move like this, German Foreign office was switching back to Windows after 10 years. Now a post on a blog of the european commission website is announcing that Spain’s autonomous region of Extremadura is going to move to a complete open source desktop.

The plan is to migrate 40,000 desktop PCs to a Debian distribution making this move the second largest open source migration right between the French Gendarmerie (90,000 desktops) and the German … Continue Reading

Big troubles for CarrierIQ as an Android developer, 25-year-old Eckhart, proves on video that all users actions are logged.
CarrierIQ also tried to silence Eckhart threatened him with legal action and huge money damages but the developer was quickly backed by The Electronic Frontier Foundation and CarrierIQ backed off.
An attempt to deny logging keystrokes is clearly undercut by the plublished video and now millions of users will start getting really really worried about their privacy.
I wonder how … Continue Reading

The last chapter of the “war of browsers” sees Chrome overtaking Firefox after an incredible season of improvements. If you google for stats you will find different versions but, according to StatCounter, last week Chrome finally became the second most popular browser.

I’ve seen many articles about this milestone but what makes me really happy at the moment is the bigger picture: competition is speeding up modern browsers improvements and this can only be a big win for the … Continue Reading

I was giving a quick look at Slashdot when I found just another unbelievable story without any sort of source: Android ICS Will Require 16GB RAM To Compile.
At first I laughed but then I remembered that my gf was struggling a few days ago to get Android sources downloaded in a decent time. Few seconds after I was looking for news on the Internet and I’ve found this message.
ICS will be a much larger release than any previous Android release.
That means that … Continue Reading

Only few days ago, at the Seattle Microsoft Company Meeting, a very sad spectacle saw MS employees leaving as soon as Steve Ballmer started his speech.
Rumors about Ballmer losing support of employees are now quickly spreading over the Internet in a period where Microsoft is facing a very big challenge: the market is quickly evolving and Microsoft is clearly struggling to keep up with changes.
I’m wondering if this will finally get Microsoft to correct its direction and think more about quality.
In the past … Continue Reading

We all know about services like tinyurl, an url shortener. The web is now full of websites offering such a service but the time has come to take it to the next level.

One of my friend and colleague, developed a new version of this service supporting multiple urls… yes… MULTIPLE urls. Its name is tabs.to.

This means that it is now possible to condensate multiple urls in just 1 tiny one. Clicking on such url will open a very simple and … Continue Reading

Oracle Corporation announced its intention to move OpenOffice.org to a purely community-based open source project and to no longer offer a commercial version of Open Office.
“Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis,” said Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect. “We intend to begin working immediately with community members … Continue Reading

Toshiba, recently awarded for customer satisfaction, announced on Tuesday the next generation of security features to improve data security.

In a press release in February Toshiba already announced the new Toshiba e-STUDIOTM855SE Series with a few security features provoking a flood of comments over the Internet.

Among the features you can find 128-bit AES HDD encryption, full Network Authentication and Data Overwrite but what I’m talking about in this post is the self-wiping hard drive.

Such device is able to wipe itself or … Continue Reading

As part of the “Let’s make the web faster” initiative, Google is experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of web pages.

Among various experiments, SPDY (pronounced “SPeeDY”) is an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency.

Since HTTP was not particularly designed for latency, there is plenty of space for improvements, in fact SPDY aims to reduce page load time to 50%, minimise deployment complexity and a lot more things. You can find … Continue Reading

Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation has recently declared that 20 years after Linus Torvalds developed the famous Linux kernel, the never ending battle between Linux and Microsoft is finally over and Linux has won.

Zemlin said “I think we just don’t care that much [about Microsoft] anymore. They used to be our big rival, but now it’s kind of like kicking a puppy.”

“Linux has come to dominate almost every category of computing, with the exception of the desktop”

Even … Continue Reading