A study by Ohio State University claims Facebook users spend less time studying and get lower grades than classmates who don’t use the site. But there are some serious flaws in the study’s logic. A survey of 219 students found that 85% of undergraduates use Facebook. Those who do have grade-point averages between 3.0 and […]
BusinessWeek is reporting that Apple’s Shuffle 3G – retail price $79.99 – is made up of parts costing just $21.77. Those costs, which include the headphones and packaging, represent just 28% of the retail price, meaning the tiny device likely has a huge profit margin. To put things into context, the components of the first […]
At Cuba’s annual Conference on Communication and Technologies in Havana, the Cuban government unveiled its latest weapon against the U.S. capitalist devils (aka Microsoft): a new distribution of Linux, called Nova. The motivation for this project is at least three-fold. First and foremost, the Cuban government is worried about rumored back doors in Microsoft’s closed operating […]
Mark O’Neill Contributing Writer, [GAS] In a move which will do no harm to the Apple share price, some US universities are starting to hand out free iPhones and free iPod Touches to new students. The benefits are obvious – be seen as a cool cutting-edge university, and at the same time, encourage your students […]
By Mackenzie Morgan
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Sometimes it’s fun to just make people think “WTF?” when they see your computer. That’s “WTF?” in a good way. It’s not hard on Linux to make people say “woah,”, but it’s even easier, if you know the command line, to make people look at you typing away on your laptop and think you’re some kind of crazy hacker having a go at the Gibson.
The first step is to ditch GNOME or KDE. Get a nice, minimalist window manager. I recommend a window manager over a regular tty for two reasons. The first is that even with screen in a tty, it’s inconvenient. The text is huge unless you sit there rebooting over and over trying to get the right framebuffer settings. The second is so you can have a nice wallpaper. I prefer Fluxbox for this. It’s just like Openbox or Blackbox, except it’s got tabbed windows like pwm and a toolbar. Other possibilities include tiling window managers like Xmonad. Ion2 is a tiling, tabbed window manager, based on pwm. I don’t know about the others, but as a Fluxbox user, I can tell you that there is no really useful menu configured by default. Your Fluxbox menu configuration is in ~/.fluxbox/menu and uses a syntax like this, and no the indentation doesn’t matter:
The following video tutorial will teach you how to set up LinuxMCE, a free linux-based solution that will transform you PC into a full media / home automation center. LinuxMCE is both very stable and extremely easy to use, so even users with limited computer knowledge can set it up.
In the following video, Law professor Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. By disrupting traditional economic production, copyright law and established competition, they’re paving the way for a new set of economic laws, where empowered individuals are put on a level playing field with […]
A few months ago, Wal-Mart started selling $199 Everex “Green PCs” in about 600 of their stores through the U.S. Unfortunately, it seems that the project was a total failure and that the interest of running penguin-powered systems among Wal-Mart customers was just not there. Computers that run the Linux operating system instead of Microsoft […]
If you think, eat and dream open-source, then the following will surely bring you to nirvana. At this year’s CES, a company named Bug Labs introduced a new concept gadget, the BUG. It’s a modular device that can be adapted to your unique needs and preferences, and can even take the place of many of […]