Cody Taylor

christian.einfeldt writes “According to an article in Laptop Magazine on-line, one-third of Dell Inspiron Mini 9s netbooks are sold with the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Dell senior product manager John New attributed the sales volume to the lower price point of the Ubuntu Linux machines. And the return rate of the Ubuntu Linux machines is approximately equal to that of comparable netbooks sold with Microsoft Windows XP. Dell spokesperson Jay Pinkert attriutes the low return rate to Dell’s good communications with its customers, saying ‘We have done a very good job explaining to folks what Linux is.'”

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An anonymous reader writes “I’ve got an Eee PC 1000HD, and frankly, I can’t stand XP. I know it’s odd, because I actually like Vista, but XP is such a giant piece of crap on here that I struggle to use it day-by-day. Anyway, my question is this: which Linux distro should I run on it? Plain Ubuntu just doesn’t have driver support. I tried Ubuntu-eee, which, to put it bluntly, does not work for me at all (slow, terrible battery life, even worse interface). I’ve heard that Jaunty Jackalope is going to have better netbook support, but that’s all the way in April! Is there a distro out now that will free me from XP’s terribleness without being terrible itself?” Getting wireless working on an Eee PC (though in my experience imperfectly) with stock Ubuntu is possible; for me it took some googling, though I’ve been told with great enthusiasm that it actually works “out of the box.” What distros are you running on your netbook, and what problems do you find?

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pmbasehore writes “While waiting for his cruise ship to depart, a man decided to use his AT&T wireless card and Slingbox account to watch the Bears vs. Lions football game. When he got his bill, he was slammed with ,067.31 in ‘International Roaming’ charges, even though he never left American soil. The bill was finally dropped to 0.65, but only after the media got involved.” He might have left the soil (the story says he was already aboard the ship), but shouldn’t the dock count?

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CNETNate writes “Apple has released the beta version of Safari 4 for Mac and PC, with claims that its Nitro rendering engine is ’30 times faster than IE7,’ and three times faster than Firefox 3. Other new features include ‘Top Sites,’ which shows users the most frequently visited Web pages, ‘Full History Search’ for searching through not only the URLs and titles of visited pages, but also the complete text within the page itself — something Opera has been doing for a while.”

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Many readers noted an outage affecting Google’s gmail service last night. Firmafest points to a statement from Google, according to which only a small subset of users were affected. According to reader CaptHarlock, mail itself remained accessible through IMAP clients, and the chat feature via external applications. jw3 asks “Of course, gmail is just one of the many providers of web-based e-mails. When I look around, almost everyone seems to be using them nowadays. So — what do you do? Do you trust that the site of your web-based e-mail provider will never go down? Do you make backups of all your e-mails?” (Some readers still seem to be unable to reach the site, too.)

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jw3 writes “The NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory scheduled for launch today has failed its mission: the payload fairing failed to separate and the launch managers declared a contingency. George Diller, NASA launch commentator, said, ‘It either did not separate or did not separate in the way that it should, but at any rate we’re still trying to evaluate exactly what the status of the spacecraft is at this point.'” Update: 02/24 14:17 GMT by T : Reader fadethepolice points out a Reuters report which says that the craft crashed into the ocean just short of Antarctica.

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afabbro writes “The US Supreme Court rejected the FTC’s bid to impose anti-trust penalties on Rambus. Without comment, they let stand an appeals court decision favoring Rambus. The FTC had found that Rambus undermined competition by getting secretly patented technology included in industry standards, but the Supremes evidently didn’t agree.”

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The Eyeball is a softball-sized camera that can be thrown into a suspect house and transmit images to soldiers outside. Or the Eyedrive, a lightweight, four-wheel, mini-robot that provides continuous, real-time 360º audio and video surveillance. It can be thrown on the ground, go down stairs, flip over and keep on going.

Apple today announced the public beta of Safari® 4, the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser for Mac® and Windows PCs. The Nitro engine in Safari 4 runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3.

Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard demonstrated the latest innovations in standards-based Web development technology during a presentation at the Southern California Linux Expo.