“The change over the last three years is staggering,” Kenyon says. “We will pre-load well over 10 million PCs with Ubuntu this year and we are more than doubling users every year in India and China.”

Still think desktop GNU/Linux is not happening? Languishing at 1%? Nope. If Ubuntu is being shipped on 2% of new PCs and it’s only one of many distros shipping on new PCs and users can install GNU/Linux easily and businesses, educational institutions and governments are deploying GNU/Linux in bunches, GNU/Linux’s share of the desktop is much larger.

Fedora, RedHat, Suse, Debian GNU/Linux are being taken up at a serious rate and there are language/culture specific distros all around the world meeting specific needs. Distrowatch shows many more hits per day for distros other than Ubuntu. Canonical’s data ignores ARMed stuff.

see Desktop Linux: the final frontier

Both the voice and flight data recorders held readable data which was downloaded under tightly controlled circumstances in the presence of expert witnesses from several international crash investigation agencies. A report will be issued by the BEA after the data are analyzed which will take some weeks or longer. A report in Le Figaro claiming the data exonerates AirBus is premature and unauthorized according to the BEA.

“These downloads gathered all of the data from the Flight Data recorder (FDR), as well as the whole recording of the last two hours of the flight from the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR).

This work will take several weeks, after which a further interim report will be written and then published during the summer.”

So, it seems there is reason to be optimistic that a more complete picture of the disaster including CVR, FDR and wreckage from the floor of the ocean can solve the mystery and help improve the safety of flying. Flying is already the safest way to travel but it will help to know the particular combination of events that caused this crash so that future crashes may be prevented.

Ed Bott has turned up instructions from Apple to support reps. Apple does not want them helping end-users get rid of a wave of malware. It will inform users not to install it though… I guess Apple sees it as thrird-party software…

see ZDnet – Ed Bott – Apple to support reps: “Do not attempt to remove malware”

This is about one of those “social engineering” attacks where an alarming message is popped up asking the user to prevent infection by installing something and btw please give your root password… It is strange that Apple will not put its support reps in the position of determining whether or not there is an infection, helping to remove it and educating the customer. Won’t the customer be really ticked off when they find out??? When the business depends on the customers’ love that does not make much sense.