April, 2017 - Nocturnalknight's Lair

Ubuntu Retires Unity, Desktop Switching Back To GNOME

By Ramkumar Sundarakalatharan | April 10, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Approximately Six year ago, Canonical made #Unity the default shell in Ubuntu. This was acclaimed to be a step to bring Ubuntu to hitherto unavailable devices like Tablets and Mobiles. I personally was not amused. The unity shell was available in one for or the other for sometime before that. Namely in the netbook remix of the Ubuntu.
Last week, Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, confirmed in a post on the company’s official blog today that the company is giving up on Unity and that the default Ubuntu desktop will be shifted back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Shuttleworth reiterated the company’s commitment to the Ubuntu desktop that millions of users across the globe rely on. It says that Canonical will continue to produce this open source desktop, maintain existing LTE releases, work with commercial partners to distribute Ubuntu, and provide support to corporate customers. Nothing is changing on that front.
He points out that the community viewed the Unity effort as fragmentation and not innovation even though the aim was to deliver it as a free software, an alternative to the closed alternatives currently available to device manufacturers.
It is out of respect for the market’s wishes (or mounting pressure from the community) that Canonical has decided to shelve this project and shift the desktop back to #GNOME starting next year.

Bezos sells $1 bn in Amazon stock yearly to pay for Blue Origin

By Ramkumar Sundarakalatharan | April 7, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday, Billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos introduced the Blue Origin capsule to the press corps.
Speaking Wednesday at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Bezos vowed to lower the cost of space travel and start taking customers to space by next year. Jeff Bezos said he is selling $1 billion in stock of his retail giant Amazon each year to finance his rocket company, Blue Origin, which aims to carry tourists to space by 2018.
The entrepreneur did not say how much a ticket would cost, as he showed off the New Shepard rocket and a mock-up of the large-windowed capsule that tourists will one day ride to suborbital space — just past the Karman Line some 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth — and back.
Bezos did say that the next-generation New Glenn rocket, which would be powerful enough to reach orbit and is expected to start flying satellites by 2020, is expected to cost $2.5 billion to develop.
Bezos did say that the next-generation New Glenn rocket, which would be powerful enough to reach orbit and is expected to start flying satellites by 2020, is expected to cost $2.5 billion to develop.
“My business model right now for Blue Origin is that I sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock and I use it to invest in Blue Origin,” he said.
“It’s very important that Blue Origin stand on its own feet and be a profitable, sustainable enterprise. That’s how real progress gets made.”
Bezos, a lifelong space enthusiast, founded Blue Origin in 2000.