Thursday, January 12, 2006

Pondering the Imponderable -- 12:41 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I managed to finish the single player campaign of Ratchet: Deadlocked last night. You know a game is fun when you look up at the clock and say, "Oh, man, I've GOT to get to bed." I was concerned about how fun the game would be at first, but the cutscenes kept the humor in what could otherwise have become a very dark game. The bots are a nice touch. They're actually helpful without getting in the way. I'm going to keep going through challenge mode and see what other goodies I can unlock. I'd also like to try out co-op mode as well as online mode with Zombie.

Thunderbird 1.5 Released -- 9:25 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Mozilla team has finally unleashed Thunderbird 1.5, the latest and greatest version of their email client. You can check out the release notes for all of the swell new features. For me, Thunderbird 1.5 isn't as big of a deal as Firefox 1.5 was, but there's still enough nice new features to make it worth upgrading. I take that as a sign of Thunderbird's maturity.

Update! The Modern Pinball skin has been updated to work with Thunderbird 1.5. Sweeeet.

The Master comments: I'm much more concerned about the security fixes than the feature-set. I'm already sold on T-bird :-) This will be an immediate upgrade for me once I've got some time for it tonight.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Fedora Core 5 Gets Mono -- 9:50 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Fedora team has decided that Fedora Core 5 will include Mono, the open-source version of Microsoft's .NET. I'm really leery about this, as is Red Hat. Red Hat is concerned because they don't want to end up in patent litigation with MS (and if you don't think that's a possibility, search this site for references to SCO). I'm wondering how long it will be before Mono is a prerequisite for Gnome itself. If/when that happens, every distribution will have to think long and hard as to whether they are willing to risk having MS bust out the patent portfolio whuppin' stick on them. There's a TMBG song that has the line "Can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding." Microsoft has given plenty of reasons for absolutely no one to trust them in the open source community. I fear that this is a deal with the Devil that we will later live to regret.

I find it more than a little bit ironic that KDE used to be the one bashed for not really being open source because of its reliance on TrollTech's QT (a situation that has long since been remedied). Now it seems like Gnome is the one doing all of the questionable things. The silence from the big names in open source/free software on this subject is deafening. Of course my distro, Slackware, has dropped Gnome altogether for other reasons so I guess it will never affect me (ha ha).

Past Two Days' News

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