Tsikbal: from my perspective

Blackberry has become a shadow fo what it was a few years ago, in large part because of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android devices. I can remember a time when the smartphone to get was a Blackberry one, now most consumers wouldn't even consider one. Personally, my first smartphone was a Nokia E63 , which I selected because at the time I was a big Nokia fan. That device really made me a fan of the QWERTY keyboard on smartphones and of the Symbian OS. When time came to replace the Nokia E63 I briefly considered the Nokia N8 , in a way to see how having a smartphone without a QWERTY keyboard would work for me. At the time, Nokia made Symbian open-source for a time before making it proprietary some time later. To be honest, I really was rooting for Nokia and Symbian to be able to make themselves strong players along Google's Android on the smartphone arena. But that didn't come to pass since Nokia went and made a deal with Microsoft, and later sell i...

This article on Linux Journal , called " The Many Paths to a Solution ", really gave an idea to explain to people who don't know much about Linux why are the so many distros out there. Many seem to believe that the main reason that there are so many reason for there being more than 50 actively maintained distros, is that Linux must not be really that good. That's not really the case, since the users of most of those distros could easily make a point for why their distro is great for them. Each distro represents a path to a solution to a problem that a group of users have to solve. That's why not every distro is a fit for every user, and also why many become disenchanted with Linux. In many of those cases, the user wasn't matched to the right distro to begin with. While in other times, the expectations weren't meet to what the distro offered. That's why its vital to match new users to the distro that better suits their needs, not to the d...

Last Monday the SAP server got busted by a virus, and all hell broke out. It took the better part of three days to set it back up, and by the fourth day it wasn't up to speed. Until this happened, nobody really gave a second thought to the fact that we all are dependent on central server to get the info we all need to do our jobs. SAP is vital for every department pass the information needed for all departments work smoothly. And while some of us use local storage to actually work some of the info in a more detailed way, our main source of information is centralized at a single server. At least in my case, and of my coworkers at my department, my work didn't come to a complete halt. Some of the info I work with, isn't dependent on SAP. As such, it means that I still could go ahead with some of my work. The same goes some of the other departments, though having access to the info on SAP sure does makes thing a lot easier. Yet, this event highlights the dangers...

Its official, Apple ditched the 3.5 mm headphone jack in favor of it's Lightning connector on the iPhone 7 . Now, Intel says that the 3.5 mm headphone jack should be replaced with a USB-C connector port. The main problem with the change, is the potential for users to get locked into an ecosystem because of compatibility issues. At this point, if you buy an iPhone 7 you'll need an adapter to use your current headphones. No doubt it the near future headphones using the Lightning connector will hit the market. The main issue here, is if Android smartphones will go with the Lighting connector or with the USB-C connector. The odds are that they go with the USB-C connector since Android already has support for it and they won't have to have to pay license fees to Apple to use it's Lightning connector. To be honest, USB-C connector is becoming ever more common. As such it has better odd of being able to replace the 3.5 mm headphone jack, and has better odds of...

Ever since OpenOffice.org became Apache OpenOffice.org , after Oracle's acquisition of  Sun Microsystems , it has been losing developers. Most of them went to fork, develop LibreOffice out of fear that OpenOffice would become an afterthought for Oracle. Even though Oracle gave contributed OpenOffice and it's source code to the Apache Software Foundation , after it indeed stop the development of the office suite, developers didn't came back to the project. As a consequence, development of OpenOffice has virtually stopped. On the other hand, LibreOffice has gained not only many new developers, but also widespread acceptance. Almost every mayor distro ships with it, and even the Italian government joining. So, learning that there is some serious consideration about shutting down the OpenOffice project all together due to lack of developers comes to the surprise of anyone. For me, its a bittersweet thing. For one, OpenOffice was the first open source offic...

One of the biggest misconceptions of free and open-source software( FOSS ) is that is free of cost. In reality, FOSS can have a monetary cost and still be fully compliant with the FOSS concept. In order to be considered free software it has to respect the following four freedoms: Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose. Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor. Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code can range from highly impractical to nearly impossible. While some prefer keep the open-source part out, and just talk about free software, I prefer to the free and ...

One of the things I enjoy most, is to create content for you all. But with my current job, I don't have as much time as I'd like to devote to create that content. For this reason , I created an account in Patreon. If you like the content that I create for you, and would like to see more of it posted you could have a part on it by sponsoring a monthly amount, or as you see fit. In order to be able devote myself a 100% to create content, I need about $500 dollars a month. The best thing for you and me, is that many of you can help me achieve that goal. If we can achieve more of $500 a month, there would be more daily updates and other ways to say thanks for your support. I thank you in advance for your support, and here's the link: patreon.com/nothaleon

When Facebook bought Whatsapp I hoped against all hope that Whatsapp wouldn't succumb to collecting data from users, and use it so Facebook would strengthen it's add business. It actually scored some kudos when it added end-to-end encryption, a good thing to protect our privacy. Alas, Whatsapp has announced that it will start collecting data and it will serve it to Facebook in order for it to be able to better able to serve ads on Facebook. So far, they claim that Whatsapp won't be serving ads on the app itself. Yet since Whatsapp promised it wouldn't serve data to Facebook to begin with, it becomes harder to believe that they'll keep their promise that they won't serve ads in the future. It now becomes a question of when they'll start doing it, and how would they look. Personally, I liked to use Whatsapp because it respected user privacy by not collecting data. And when it started using full encryption end-to-end, it strengthen it's positi...

While open-source software has it's advantages for everyone, it doesn't really goes as far as it should to protect users freedoms or to make innovation easier. For that, it also needs to be free software , which is possible using a free software license such as GNU General Public License and the Mozilla Public License . Its not enough for users to have access to the source code to study it, users need to be free to modify and redistribute it as well. In order to raise awareness among as many users as possible, I believe that its vital to refer to software that has both attributes as free and open-source software . For many non-technical users, don't really see or understand that just because application is open-source it doesn't mean its free software, most specifically libre software. There is some confusion, since that access to the source code doesn't mean that your four freedoms are respected. These freedoms are the following: Freedom 0: The f...

As this article points out,  security through obscurity in software is not really all that safer than software using FLOSS. The evidence so far seems that proprietary software doesn't have that good run so far, and what it make it worse is that in some cases people could have cough on what was going on if it was possible to audit the software independently by third parties. To be honest, all software is vulnerable to have malicious code injected and to have bugs that could be maliciously exploited. But the difference between between free software and proprietary software, is that on free software that malicious code can be discovered in a faster and easier way. True, there are examples where there has been vulnerabilities that have been missed for years. But, most of the time vulnerabilities are found and corrected relatively fast. This is particularly important on code used on applications that where human lives are on the line, where is vital to have third parties audi...

Denuvo, a DRM solution, has proven that it can be defeated . Though the crack was patched a couple of days later, that someone managed to defeat kind of makes a point against DRM as a solution for piracy. Let's face it, most of the piracy problem has it's roots on people wanting to share what they love with others. We want to share with others the music, videos, and other content with others. With the advent of computers and the internet, doing so legally speaking has become almost impossible, since the companies who provide such content want to have absolute control on how we share that content. The truth is not the scale, not the fact that the content is shared. While a portion of that sharing is illegal, most of it is just people sharing what they love with others that have the same taste as they do. As such, DRM and other tech that prevent such sharing among peers, comes in the way of people discovering new thing they would be willing to pay for than otherwise the...