The goal of this site is to introduce new users to Ubuntu by way of short video clips that highlight Ubuntu's features and demonstrate how to complete common tasks. If you know of our have any clips that would help new users get started please submit them here. The site is sponsored by SFU's Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology.
Whats up everyone? I was just taking a look at Google Trends and I found out something interesting. Apparently Ubuntu Linux has not only surpassed its major competitor in Linux ( SuSE ) in popularity, as well as the distro it's based off of (Debian) , but it seems to have also surpassed another major competitor. Yes, that's right! Apple Computer's very own Mac OS X has also been defeated in popularity by Ubuntu! Check it out for yourself. Here is a screenshot I took not 15 minutes ago. The blue line you see shooting up to the sky there is Ubuntu itself, while Mac OS, SuSE and Debian seem to all hang around the same general level of popularity. I've purposely left Windows out of this graph because if added, all of these OS's crawl near the bottom of the graph in an almost flat line compared to Windows' wild lead. Just thought this was pretty cool! Free software is definetly making some serious progress.
Run Windows XP and want to have the benefit of easier to read, less-jaggy fonts system-wide? Yeah, I thought so too. Right-click the desktop, select Properties, head over to the Appearance tab and click on the Effects button. In the window that opens up, check the second box that says Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts and select ClearType from the drop-down menu, then OK out of all windows.
Those steps will just enable ClearType on your system with the default settings. If you want to fine tune the appearance, download the ClearType Tuner from Microsoft and use its wizard. It can do things like adjust contrast and LCD screen striping.
After browsing around online on a friend’s computer I realized how horrible everything looks, my site included, without ClearType enabled.
Google has merged its separate Writely and spreadsheets web applications into Google Docs & Spreadsheets. The new service will further Google’s strength as an online office suite, currently competing with Zoho.
Intel, the corporation responsible for your speedy Mac, has launched the IT@Intel Blog. It seems like all the big companies are catching on to this business blogging trend; I love it. A quick look around the blog will get you a page about the authors and there are some heavy hitters in there, including the director for the Platform Capability group and the manager for the Enterprise Collaboration & Engineer group at Intel. I have read the first few posts and if things keep up, it will be an interesting blog to watch.
Rohit Bhargava, who handles some of Intel’s PR needs, has more on this as well as Intel’s partnership with Second Life. The IT@Intel blog isn’t Intel’s first foray into blogging, they actually run quite a few blogs and I can tell you there will be one more coming soon.
CNET has launched a new site dedicated to video clips for everything from news to reviews. Anyone familiar with CNET knows that they are no stranger to video. Nearly every product review is accompanied with a short video review. CNET decided to take this familiarity with video and sprout an entirely new site.
As with all CNET ventures, CNET TV is new user friendly. Videos have RSS feeds and users have the ability to download videos to their iPod. Currently the site is divided up into several channels: News on CNET, Gadgets & Gear, Tips & Tricks, Gaming, Car Tech, Shows, Movies & Music and Tech News. Each channel has a playlist of many clips, each averaging a couple of minutes in length. I commend CNET for taking the initiative to create a site like this. Bringing video and TV to the web is inevitable and large media corporations are embracing is, such as CNN with their Pipeline. However, in some aspects CNET TV is just a glorified video podcast site and does not fully immerse the user as watching a TV does. Maybe they should have just named it CNET Vidcasts?
Linux users will be pleased to know that Redhat’s Fedora Project has unveiled Fedora Core 6 today. Due to the high traffic of the Redhat site today, downloading FC6 over BitTorrent is probably the fastest method. Fedora Core 6 features numerous improvements such as an AIGLX framework merged into Xorg, support for Intel-based Macs and a better installer. Update: Check out this FC6 review.
