iPod Shuffle: the tiny device with the huge profits

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 […]

Cuba launches its own Linux distro: Nova

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 […]


Universities hand out free iPhones to students

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 […]

Minimalist Linux to Confuse the Masses

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:

Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics

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 […]