Still nothing on the front page yet, but the cd/dvd-images are available here.

Also, the realtime kernel options seems to be dropped in 10.10, see e.g. this post on the mailinglist. The maintainer has dropped support and nobody else has stepped up to take over his work...

But no news on Ubuntu Studio yet. Last time (April 29th, 2010), it was released on the same day.

Edubuntu is released today.

The only one I'm aware of is Appleseed. It's also distributed, it's in development for several years now, has working beta-servers, and is probably much closer to a final release than Diaspora.

Ok, time to return to Appleseed, the distributed social networking software which already is in development for several years now, already has working beta-servers, and is probably much closer to a final release than Diaspora.

For those who don't know ureadahead, there's a good explanation by the developer on the Ubuntu forums.

The Shuttle XS35GT is a fanless box with the new NVIDIA ION2 GPU, if you put a SSD drive in it it's 100% silent. It should be able to handle H.264 1080p without a problem. You can run Linux (e.g. XBMCbuntu) or Win7 with XBMC on it. It also supports a DVD, DVD-RW or Bluray drive.

Another option is the Xtreamer, I don't know much about it but it's cheap ($99, that's without a HD) and according to the site it can play 1080p (the new Apple TV only supports 720p). It has an option ("SideWinder") to attach external heat sinks to make it fanless.

A good place for more information is the XBMC hardware forum.

This is from the news site of one of the mayor Belgian television/radio groups (VRT), they have a selection of articles in English.

Belgian investigators expose fraud
http://www.deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws.english/news/100724_bank_fraud

Support this project, I did: http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Appleseed-Project

Appleseed is a lot more near completion than Diaspora is. They are already working for 6 years on it, and currently have a working prototype running on test servers.

Diaspora is now saying how their demo is "pretty fast" with message passing. They do show 6 connected servers in the video, but there is only one active user. And they never talk about scaling up (to thousands/millions of users). Scalability should be a factor considered from the start for this kind of application. They don't mention anything related to it in their "road map," instead they have items like "Implement awesome user interface."

I'm not trying to ridicule Diaspora here, actually I also donated to them. I would love to see a decentralized and open source alternative to Facebook. But I think Appleseed is much more ahead.

So for all the money the Diaspora guys collected for just presenting an idea, I think the Appleseed guys also deserve to get some funds to continue working on their project.

And even typing "sex" in the url bar won't bring you to sex.com. By default, IE will do a Bing search, Chrome will do a Google search, and Firefox will simply try to connect to the "sex" domain, which will fail (unless you have a web server named sex on your internal network).

If it wasn't so bad in the EU yet, our rights are certainly deteriorating. We currently have two Pirate Party members in the European Parliament, we need more of them! Christian Engström, the first Pirate Party MEP, already spoke out after a previous leak of ACTA documents.

Most of the time I cross such a shortened url, I want to see the full url before the redirect is completed. Tinyurl's preview option let me do that, without an account/login, it just saves the setting in a cookie.

Bit.ly has a Firefox plugin to preview urls, but I don't want to install a browser plugin for each service. And what if I'm using another browser?

I'm hoping Google will implement something similar to Tinyurl's system.

Of course they do. Hint, people don't search for "facebook" in Google, they search for other people's names.

Google already let another company change the name of their programming language, although that company used the name first. That company (RemObjects) had a language named Chrome, an Object Pascal based language for .NET. When Google published their Chrome web browser, RemObjects renamed the language to Oxygene (Wikipedia link). The details of the deal between RemObjects and Google were never disclosed, but I guess a nice amount of money changed hands.

I think it's very annoying when you read the first page on Google Fast Flip, and you click through to the publisher's site, you're back at the top of the article. So you have to search the page to find which part you already read, and where to continue reading. Seems definitely not quicker to me...

FYI, here in Belgium, operators scramble to please the crowd at music festivals. Youth is an important demographic to them, and for all the big festivals one of the main GSM operators is a main sponsor. The extra demand is countered by having mobile cell towers placed somewhere near the festival ground to provide extra capacity.

Obviously, when thousands of people are texting, there will be delays. But in my experience, even then it would take at most 15 minutes to deliver a SMS message.