My philosophy homepage and blog (Wide Scope)
It’s been awhile since I’ve banged the open source drums. Here’s random assortment of interesting open source news that I’ve bookmarked over the last month.
Filed under: open source by Andrew Cullison
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Story here. Read on to the end. Ken (the author of the post and the open source advocate in the story) reports about a conversation he had with other members of the attacker’s party. This conversation happened after the attack. The discussion reveals something interesting about the technical support strategy that underlies tech support for [...]
Filed under: open source, ubuntu by Andrew Cullison
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Zotero 1.5 just launched their beta version. I’ve been playing around with a preview version of this. It was awesome then, and it looks like the beta version is loaded with even more goodies.
Filed under: open source by Andrew Cullison
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I opened a spreadsheet in google docs today and discovered that I can now edit my google doc spreadsheets from the google phone! Google was heavily criticized for not hitting the ground with this kind of functionality. I’m glad to see they’re so quick to work on this. This really opens up the phone for [...]
Filed under: android, educational technology, google phone, open source, research tools, sympoze, teaching by Andrew Cullison
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In this post, I wrote about the issue of using the white spaces freed up by the switch to digital TV to enable wide-spread affordable high speed internet (especially in rural areas). The FCC just voted to do that! As I noted in the previous post, this is not some issue that only technophiles should [...]
Filed under: open source by Andrew Cullison
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Here’s a good discussion about how eVoting should be done. Of particular interest, is the case made for using an open source software for the electronic voting machines. With closed-source, proprietary software a company has the perfect cover to pull some cloak-and-dagger stuff (e.g., insert a backdoor program that allows for the creator to manually [...]
Filed under: ethics, open source by Andrew Cullison
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Last week I wrote about the Open Office 3.0 note feature. If you have students submit papers electronically - OpenOffice 3.0 is a big improvement - because you can type notes and comments that appear in colored bubbles in the margins. The problem is that in OpenOffice 3.0 these comment bubbles appear outside the printable [...]
Filed under: open source, research tools, teaching, ubuntu by Andrew Cullison
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Here’s a reason for academics to be interested in OpenOffice 3.0 - It has a much improved notes feature. Recent version of MS Word enables users to include notes in the margins. I rely on that feature a lot to write up comments on papers from my colleagues or my students. MS Word always had [...]
Filed under: open source, research tools, ubuntu by Andrew Cullison
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I’ve been going on and on about how wonderful I think the open source movement is, but not everyone is so enthusiastic. One of the biggest obstacles to the open source movement is whether or not there is a viable open source business model - How can you make money on software if you’re giving [...]
Filed under: open source, the academy, ubuntu by Andrew Cullison
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