The ONE thing M$ is very good at is propaganda, more commonly know as FUD. People like belonging to things and the Windows 7 launch parties make it cool so that people want to belong. Certain sections of the media also take this so that M$ now does not even have to pay for their marketing.

If we have a Linux release party and “Two techies from the area teamed up to highlight ******* *’* key features and answer questions”, people will most likely say or at least think that is because nobody else understands Linux. Insert Linux distro of choice in the appropriate space.

To promote Linux and in this writers case, UBUNTU, we have to give it a cool factor so that general users WANT to belong to the group of Linux users. Make it a cool, fun, easy “club”  to belong to.

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Apologies to all here and at Ubuntu-ZA for not being active the last 3 weeks.

Jono Bacon, an Ubuntu community manager, has written a book which offers a collection of his experiences and observations in building and growing communities.  It’s called “The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation“. The print edition which is published by O’Reilly is expected to cost about R400 from Amazon.com. However it is available as a free download from Jono’s site www.artofcommunityonline.org. Those who attended the Software Freedom Day event in Pretoria may find it a useful resource to go along with Stefan’s presentation on “Community”. Debian founder Ian Murdock is included among key Open Source community members recommending this book.

One of the less-reported announcements around Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard release last week was the open sourcing of Apple’s new multi-core technology. Released under the Apache 2.0 licence, Grand Central is a user and kernel space library which adds new language features, runtime libraries and other enhancements to support concurrent code execution on multi-core hardware. Grand Central doesn’t solve the design issues of parallel code, that is still left to the developer, but it does make the process of spinning off threads more efficient by managing the threads execution on available processor cores.

Stanford photo scientists are out to reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an open-source digital camera, which will give programmers around the world the chance to create software that will teach cameras new tricks.

If the technology catches on, camera performance will be no longer be limited by the software that comes pre-installed by the manufacturer. Virtually all the features of the Stanford camera – focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. – are at the command of software that can be created by inspired programmers anywhere. “The premise of the project is to build a camera that is open source,” said computer science professor Marc Levoy.

Computer science graduate student Andrew Adams, who helped design the prototype of the Stanford camera (dubbed Frankencamera,) imagines a future where consumers download applications to their open-platform cameras the way Apple apps are downloaded to iPhones today. When the camera’s operating software is made available publicly, perhaps a year from now, users will be able to continuously improve it, along the open-source model of the Linux operating system for computers or the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Full story at Science Daily