Screaming Penguin

Gruber asks:

Verizon to Sell Galaxy Tab Starting November 11 for $599.99 At this price, who buys one of these instead of an iPad — especially considering that the iPad will be right there next to it in Verizon stores?

A: Anyone who realizes a similarly equipped iPad is $830. This has been simple answers to simple questions.

Linux Fund has expanded its partnership with the Gnash media player team to bring OpenStreetMap editing support to the open source Flash® player, Gnash. This work will also improve YouTube compatibility and joins Linux Fund's existing effort to bring the Real Time Messaging Protocol support to Gnash. OpenStreetMap. the free wiki world map, is an editable map of the whole world built by community contributions. To contribute and donate towards the Gnash OSM support see the Linux Fund website.

My new Linux machine I recently ended up building a new home desktop running Ubuntu - Intrepid Ibex. I use this machine mostly for development work, but being a home "desktop" it also needs to serve as a great web browsing platform, play music and videos, have a word processor and other essential software, connect easily to other local machines, and support devices like a fancy graphics card, a DVD burner, a headset, and so on. I considered buying a new MacBook, and just docking it at the house, but for the money the machine I could build far outperforms what I could buy from Apple. Don't get me wrong, I still really like Apple (fanboy, yes), but I ended up with a great Intel P45 chipset motherboard (Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R), 3.16GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB ram, a 512MB Nvidia 8800 GT video card, dual raided 400GB SATA drives (nice ones), a 1TB non raided drive, and the rest including a wireless keyboard and mouse, and 22" LCD monitor for under $1K (well under actually). I started from the Ars System Guide in terms of components, and then went off in a few tangents of my own. I couldn't touch that with any Mac product, much less a MacBook (it's not a fair comparison to the mobile machine, I know that, but I felt I could keep my old MacBook for going mobile and throw some horsepower at the desktop while using Ubuntu).

Ubuntu has become my favored Linux distro as of late, and 8.10 or Intrepid Ibex is supposed to go final today. Ubuntu is impressive to me for it's simplicity and reliability, stuff just works as you would expect. Really the difference with Ubuntu over other the other Linux distros that I have used for a decade+ is that it's more intuitive at install/upgrade and or add new feature or piece of software time. Underneath it all it's the same stuff of course (Debian Linux, and either Gnome or KDE), but it's just packaged and polished a bit more than other offerings. Ibex has a laundry list of new packages and a new kernel, and many new features (new Gnome, use of NetworkManager which supports 3G, and more). Also, it might seem small with all of the other changes, but it's about damn time Tomcat 6 made it into the main repo.

Gufw is an easy to use Ubuntu / Linux firewall, powered by ufw.Gufw is an easy, intuitive, way to manage your Linux firewall. It supports common tasks such as allowing or blocking pre-configured, common p2p, or individual ports port(s), and many others! Gufw is powered by ufw, runs on Ubuntu, and anywhere else Python, GTK, and Ufw are available. Full Story

PyTube is a GUI for various command-line tools such as:youtube-dl, sox, mplayer, mencoder, ffmpeg and others.It allows you to resize, rotate, apply an external mp3 into a video, generate a 10 to 30 seconds mp3 ring tone. Full Story

Maximum Transmission Unit(MTU), the largest physical packet size, measured in bytes, that a network can transmit. Any messages larger than the MTU are divided into smaller packets before being sent.By optimizing the MTU setting you can gain substantial network performance increases, especially when using dial-up modem connections. Full Story

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. The initial distributor of the complete file or collection acts as the first seed. Each peer that downloads the data also uploads it to other peers. Relative to standard internet hosting, this provides a significant reduction in the original distributor's hardware and bandwidth resource costs. It also provides redundancy against system problems and reduces dependence on the original distributor.