Answer: YES WE CAN!

Vote with your mouse.

When I started my blog, I used to post about 2 posts a month. Over the last few months, this has increased quite a bit, and it is likely do continue. WordPress (the great blogging software that I use) has support for multiple feeds, so I decided to make use of it, and created a page containing links to feeds that WordPress automatically generates based on categories and tags.

Selecting a feed for a specific category/tag may be useful if you only want to read posts about certain topics, or if you want to add my blog to an on-line feed like a Planet while only filtering through relevant posts.

A list of the available feeds are available here:

http://jonathancarter.co.za/feeds

A lawsuit against Microsoft for classifying hardware as Vista Capable, when it is in fact only capable of running the simplistic Windows Vista Home Basic version, has been granted by a judge as a class-action lawsuit (man, we really need one of those against Telkom for their pathetic service). Microsoft will probably attempt to blame their resellers for this, biting the hands that help feed it, but in my opinion, it should be Microsoft’s responsibility to educate their partners on the exact system requirements of their upcoming products. A computer manufacturer cannot in any way predict the exact specifications of Microsoft’s upcoming systems, not even when testing pre-release versions, since they are often in debug mode which would make it run somewhat slower.

I also think that the industry is wising up to Microsoft quickly, consumers are also learning that Microsoft isn’t the angel software house that many people previously believed, and as a result, I think we will see many more class action lawsuits against them in the next few years.

Maybe Microsoft will finally learn to play nicely. Not because they want to, but because they have to.

Have been in Jo’burg for about a week now. Ligthning struck the guest house I’m staying at, and it knocked out the DSL router, and 3G coverage has been choppy, so I have been Internetless (see Internetlessness for title definition) until today (except at the office of course, but we’ve been having troubles there too). Apologies if for any on-line meetings, etc I have missed.

The Ubuntu-ZA Planet and Wiki themes are coming along nicely. The planet needs a little bit of work (mainly for the hackergotchis to display nicely) and so does the wiki. After that, we just need to make sure that we’ve got all the data imported from the old wiki, then we will go live. Thanks to Ubuntu-IN for providing the Mediawiki theme. I will post links to both the wiki and the planet themes when they are at least semi-ready. I haven’t had a chance to work on either for the last week, but by the end of next weekend it should be just about complete.

From Tectonic, I read that Sun Microsystems is in the process of acquiring Innotek, makers of Virtualbox. Virtualbox is a relatively new free virtualisation suite that compares well to many of the proprietary virtualisation suites. This comes just a month after they bought MySQL for a cool US$1bn. Virtualbox is also packaged for Ubuntu, you can get it by installing the virtualbox-ose package.

Is it just me? Or are companies now acquiring other companies at a much larger rate than usual? It seems that the landscape of the free software and the proprietary software industries are getting quite shaked up by these acquisitions. Motorola may be selling their cellphone division soon, and Google is working hard on the Android platform, I’ve been speculating internally whether Google would buy them out (or even whether they’ll have enough money to do so). Google’s focus is on the software side, but I think it would give them a healthy boost to acquire a big market share out of the box. Then again, that’s a bit off-topic for this post, I think 2008 will prove to be an interesting year for the information industry with all these acquisitions that have taken place, and those still looming.

It seems that Microsoft has learned that it can’t beat Google on its own, and according to this Bloomberg article, they have made an unsolicited offer to buy out Yahoo! for US$44.6bn.

The offer comes at a huge premium above the worth of actual Yahoo! share prices, read the full story from Bloomberg.com.

2008-02-04 Update: Official Google statement on the future of Yahoo! and the Internet