The Barrel

Power outages still affect almost 15,000 residents

Davenport, QUAD CITIES — Mid American Energy reports almost 15,000 Quad City area residents are still without power Friday morning, 96 hours after a powerful thunderstorm struck the region Monday morning.
The biggest concentration of power outages remains in Rock Island and Moline where 10,000 customers remain without power at 3 a.m. Friday.
Rock Island library officials [...]

Posted in Personal

Yahoo! Music Going Dark, Taking Keys With It

 
iminplaya writes with a link to an excellent article at Ars Technica, extracting from it a few choice nuggets: "The bad dream of DRM continues. Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good — and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September [...]

Posted in News

Report: Google in acquisition talks with Digg

Social-news site Digg.com, a perpetual target of acquisition rumors, is in “final negotiations” to sell itself to Google for $200 million, according to a TechCrunch report Tuesday that cited multiple sources.
Google has been in talks to bring Digg into the Google News group, but it could be a few weeks before the deal closes, if [...]

Posted in News

Linux 2.6.26 enhances desktop Linux

 
A new stable kernel is out. Three months in the making, Linux 2.6.26 boasts read-only bind mounts, better USB webcam support, 802.11s mesh WiFi, virtualization and paravirtualization improvements, and a ton of new peripheral drivers.
Darn and it even fixed a couple of hardware problems I had gotta love it, Baldy

Linux 2.6.26 enhances desktop Linux

Posted in Linux

Almost Back to Normal

Hi folks here a couple of the pictures from my neighborhood. This is the results of a storm that came through on Monday morning at 6am. I have a ton of the them that show how dark it was worse than any starless night you could dream of. Now I have had a taste of [...]

Posted in Personal

Linus Has Something on His Mind

Linus Torvalds — founder, creator, and general master of all things Linux — is not exactly known for being bashful or slow to share his thoughts. To quote the man himself: “I’m a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people can ever think otherwise.” This week, though, he’s gotten an extra share of attention.
The [...]

Posted in Linux

Dell is serious about Ubuntu: Launches first consumer Linux PCs

Dell today flipped the switched and is now officially offering consumer desktop and notebook PCs with Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed. Two notebooks and one desktop join two desktop systems in Dell’s open-source product portfolio.

There is no denying that Linux recently has gained traction in the consumer space and Microsoft may have to look a little more [...]

Posted in Linux

Bush ; Before And Now

 
Who knew the Onion would be right? [Thanks Mister Justin] BTW, this chart is out of date. Remember the good, old days of $3 gas? Good times, good times…
Darn this came from the Onion? And I am so sorry to say so correct, Thanks GW, Baldy
 

Bush — Before And Now

Posted in News

Arch Linux for the DIY Linux user

 
There’s no dearth of Linux distributions for desktop users or even for running high availability servers. But if you are a do-it-yourself computer user, your choice of Linux distros is fairly limited. You can build Linux from scratch with Linux from Scratch or compile your own set of packages with Gentoo. But if you want [...]

Posted in Linux

Canadian open source community upset over proposed copyright law

 
The Government of Canada has angered those who believe that a proposed copyright law threatens the country’s open source business model. Russell McOrmond, a member of the Canadian Software Innovation Alliance (CSIA), says that Bill C-61, the proposed copyright legislation unveiled by the government last month, ignores just about every recommendation made by CSIA, a [...]

Posted in News