Telkom “transforms to attack”

• From ITWeb, Telkom is transforming to attack, supposedly moving away from acting like a parastatal. While they’re trying to convince everyone, yet another Telkom hate site emerges.

Motorola boss doesn’t do e-mail

• According to this Engadget article, the CEO of Motorola, Greg Brown, is so out of touch with technology that he doesn’t use his computer for communication. His secretary actually prints out his e-mails and brings it to him! That’s terrible for someone who is supposed to lead a communications company.

Sony BMG are mass-scale software pirates

• Saving the best for last, Sony BMG is probably one of the most proprietary companies on the planet, aggressively enforcing their copyright wherever possible. It turns out they are large scale software pirates themselves. This article points out that the BSA found that Sony BMG had a piracy rate of 47%! Scumbags. I guess this is one of those times where I get to shout “THAT’S WHAT THEY GET!” (thanks Nofx)

From Slashdot, Karl and Tectonic: The South African minister of public service and administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, said that software patents pose a considerable threat to the growth of the African software sector at the Idlelo 3 conference in Dakar, Senegal. She also said that it is “unfortunate” that the leading office suite provider (which would imply Microsoft by market share) have not adopted the ODF standard.

Paulo Ferreira, platform strategy manager for Microsoft South Africa, then spread ignorance on the matter by saying “There is no such thing as free software. Nobody develops software for charity“. He also said “For innovation to continue, there needs to be value – and even open-source applications have some form of market model, which incentivises them to continue innovating”. You would expect that someone who works for Microsoft would at least do a bit of research on the subject before attending a large FOSS conference such as Idlelo. I think that the average staff at Microsoft simply do not understand free software, or the economics behind it.

Whohoo! My first real holiday since… since… a very long time! Haven’t planned all my holiday time yet, but this is what I have so far…

• 21 March: Go to Rand Easter Show
• 23 March: Fly home to Cape Town
• 24 March: Going to Coke Fest. \o/ Just saw on the “news” that Paris Hilton is going to be at the Joburg one- hehe. I think I’ll particularly enjoy:
  • Van Coke Kartel- With “Van Coke” from Fokofpolisiekar)
  • Chris Cornell- From Soundgarden/Audioslave
  • Kaiser Chiefs- They’ll change the mosh-pits to mob-pits
  • Good Charlotte- I hope they play more of their earlier (less emo) stuff.
  • KoRn- They have a Jonathan, what more can I say?
• 25 March: Clug Talk: Xrandr (Adrian Frith), MOTU FTBFS class after that
• 26 March: WordPress Cape-Town meet-up, Xubuntu meeting for Xubuntu goals after that.
• 27 March: CITI IT services and Open Source seminar
• 2 April: Fly to Bahrain (in the Middle East) and party
• 6 April: Go watch the F1 Grand Prix

Next week I’ll also try to catch up on a lot of Ubuntu stuff (more on that to follow) I’ve been meaning to do for a long long time now (some things even 2 years). After that I’ll just relax and have a good time, I want to get back in full force and really take 2008 by the horns!

Just found this via Engadget, a roll of toilet paper from Japan featuring all the features of Windows Vista SP1! I would actually buy this if I could, seriously.

Maybe not, but at least he’s more popular than Hillary

The Free Software Foundation have made big strides in the software world since 1985. Until very recently though, you couldn’t really say the same for their marketing department. In recent years, the foundation has been focussing more on spreading the word than actual development, and the focus seems to have shifted to what is currently most important for free software users, which also includes the formation of the GPLv3. Towards the end of last year, they launched a fund-raiser for recruiting new FSF members, a method in which users can donate money to the organisation. A few weeks ago, they have also relaunched their website:

This week, they have also launched the Free Software Supporter, the new FSF newsletter. You can get notifications of the latest and greatest versions by subscribing to the info-fsf list (low traffic). Read the first edition:

• HTML version: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-fsf/2008-03/msg00000.html
• Plain text version: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-fsf/2008-03/txt6WM6sG7rpd.txt

Newsletters usually start very simple, and then grow as time goes by and the audience gets larger. Please tell your friends to subscribe!

Dear Corey

First of all, I think it’s common wisdom in the Ubuntu community that Ubuntu bug reports should rather be filed in Launchpad, and not be sent to someone’s inbox where they are hidden from the rest of the world.

Secondly, please enable comments on your blog. In the past, people have disabled comments to prevent spam. With the spam filtering software available these days in just about any blogging platform, this is hardly necessary any more. Write-only communication is considered bad manners in the on-line world.

For what it’s worth, I run Hardy on a fairly low-spec machine (Centrino 1.6ghz, 512MB RAM) and it performs fine. If you could create a Launchpad bug report with your exact hardware specifications, then the problem could possibly be traced down to a bug in some hardware drivers that may be causing the problem (I had a similar problem during the Feisty and Gutsy development cycles).

Update: I’ve striked the request for Cory to change the way his posts work. As one commenter said, it’s not really my place to dictate. I still do wisht that Advogato would either allow comments, or that people who post things to planets post from a platform that allows comments.