On March 18, FinCEN – the financial crimes enforcement arm of the United States Treasury – released guidance regarding the use of BitCoin and other virtual currencies that are exchanged for actual cash. This ruling could have meaning, however, for “gold farmers” as well. Gold farmers, or businesses that deal in the buying, selling and [...]
Unity 7 Fast-tracked Into Ubuntu 13.04
Unity 7 Ubuntu developer Michael writes in his blog that his feature freeze extension request in launchpad has been approved. Because of this feature freeze, Unity 7 will now ship as a component of 13.04. He writes: It’s a lot of new code, but it should all be available in a PPA in the next [...]
Humble Indie Bundle 7 Will Be Worst Humble Bundle Ever For Linux
Clarification — It seems that the Humble Botanical Bundle was originally referred to as “Humble Indie Bundle 7“. The games mentioned in this article are not accurate, rather the result of a drunken Google session and a “Jump To Conclusions” mat. Our apologies. Running Out Of Ideas Those that are feeling a little miffed by [...]
WordPress Reaches 3.5, Rides The Coltrane
Splash, Crash, Ride, Bass! WordPress, everyone’s favorite open source comtent management system, reached version 3.5 today. Introduced with the release is a bevy of new features that are sure the leave the first half of the 3.x series in the dust. WordPress says that among the most outstanding features are a “completely re-imagined flow for [...]
Swiss City Mandates Use Of Open Source, Banishes Microsoft Officially
Europe Moving Forward In an overwhelming majority vote, the city council in Bern, Switzerland has moved to implement all future infrastructure with open source technologies. The “Party Motion”, as it is called in Switzerland, was submitted over a year ago, and has finally been realized. Plans to move forward with open source design, strategy and [...]
GEGL Dev Seeks Crowd-funding Model For GIMP Components
GIMP developer Nicolas Robidoux seeks to leverage a freedom-based crowd-funding solution to bank-roll completion of the Nohalo/Lohalo/Lojaggy/Loblur suite of image resamplers for GEGL. The idea started back on Nov. 11th in the GIMP mailing list. Robidoux answers whether or not he plans to create a project on Kickstarter or not. Prospective GIMP “patron”: I would love [...]
How Lightworks Falsely Rides Open Source Publicity Train
2 years ago, Lightworks made a promise to the open source community. A promise that has made them darlings of the open source spotlight. A promise that the have yet to fulfill. One blogger takes serious issue with this lack of fullfilment, and rightly so. Blogger Nekohayo offers in depth insight into the failed promises of [...]
UBUNTU.AUDIOCA.ST: Unbelievably Stupid
So I set out today to rediscover Diaspora, the open social network that was once a Kickstarter phenomenon. While I didn’t spend much time there, I did stumble across something relatively new that I had not yet heard of. UBUNTU.AUDIOCA.ST. Now, don’t let the post title fool you. I have nothing really bad to say [...]
Using Ubuntu To Create An Illegitimate Referral Based Profit Center
Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Free As we near the release of the biggest consumer-oriented commercial software to ever hit Linux, some negative realities from other platforms may make a nasty appearance in Ubuntu. Why? That’s easy; as Ubuntu gains traction with the desktop buying masses, there will be more and more individuals who are simply [...]
The Freedom to Innovate – Interaction Design for Plasma Active
I first learned about Plasma Active on a KDE User Experience sprint in April 2011. Sebastian Kügler was talking about their new project called Plasma Active, which aimed to bring the KDE experience to devices other than desktops, laptops and netbooks. It would provide a framework for application creators to easily adapt their UIs to different [...]