Daily Archives: Friday, August 16, 2013

  • Would you buy a used Capita T&I?

    According to company financial information website DueDil, Capita Translation & Interpreting, the company that has been entrusted (rather foolishly. Ed.) by the Ministry of Justice with providing interpreting services for courts and tribunals in England and Wales (posts passim), is not doing particularly well financially, as the screenshot of the company’s latest basic financial information shows.

    screenshot of Capita T&I financial data
    Click on the image for the full-sized version

    Would you buy this company or offer it more work?

    Answers in the comments please!

  • Happy 20th birthday, Debian

    Today, 16th August 2013, marks the 20th birthday of Debian GNU/Linux, one of the Linux world’s most venerable and respected distributions.

    Ian Murdock founded the Debian Project back in 1993 and since then it has turned out to be a truly free community project aiming to build a free Linux operating system – something that would have been impossible without Debian’s strong community of users and developers.

    In the intervening 20 years, Debian has grown to be one of the most influential and largest open source projects, used as a base in many popular Linux operating systems, such as Ubuntu.

    image of cake iced with Debian logo
    A cake with the Debian ‘swoosh’ logo

    Dubbed the “universal operating system” Debian is available in over 70 languages and supports an enormous range of computer types, with over 20,000 software packages for more than 10 different computer architectures.

    I use the latest version of Debian – codenamed ‘wheezy’ – on my laptop, whilst my main desktop machine runs Mepis, a Debian derivative featuring the KDE desktop. Over the years, I’ve found Debian (and derivatives) very stable, reliable and secure.

    Why not treat yourself on Debian’s birthday? Go and grab a disk image and install it! 🙂