Since Easter is close for a lot of people, I thought that giving you an Easter Egg can't be a bad idea. In fact, you don't even have to celebrate Easter these days, since the egg I am going to give you isn't quite related to the Christian celebration. In fact, it's about "a hidden message or feature in an application," known as an Easter Egg. Ooook...so let's reveal Notepad's dark secret, shall we?


The screenshot above doesn't look right, don't you think? Well, some may consider this a bug, and not an Easter Egg, and they may even be right, but let's not fight over this, and see what happened...

1. Open Notepad.

2. Type "bush hid the facts"

3. Save the file, it doesn't really matter what file name are you going to use

4. Open the file again and contemplate the result...

Leaving the conspiracy theories aside, the US president doesn't have anything to do with this. In fact, you could try using something like "cats eat the mouse," and the result will be the same.

Pretty interesting, don't you think?

Just as expected, Hardy Heron arrived! About a month after releasing Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Beta, Canonical Ltd. came up with the final release of its latest "Long Term Support" Ubuntu Linux, available in a wide range of flavors, as we're going to see right away...


First, let's see what Canonical says about the Desktop edition of Ubuntu 8.04, shall we?

"Ubuntu 8.04 LTS raises the bar on the Linux desktop experience. It includes the latest, stable version of many core products, and in that spirit is the first distribution to bring Mozilla Firefox 3 (Beta 5) to millions of users. The combination of Linux and Firefox make Ubuntu 8.04 LTS a superb web desktop, with fast browsing and greatly reduced exposure to viruses, web forgery and spyware.

Enhanced photo experience: The enhanced default photo manager, F-Spot, together with improved camera and phone recognition means users can upload, tag, manage, display, delete, print and share photos with friends and family more easily.

Music sharing and download: Users can plug in a PSP, share playlists with friends, buy from the Magnatune online music store, stream live radio and plug in more devices than ever (with UpnP).

Better video: The new default movie player now allows users to browse YouTube and other video sources across the web and to share their videos with others. It integrates with Myth TV, the open source TVR, so users can watch their favourite TV shows straight on the desktop. Brasero allows them to easily burn all content to CD or DVD.

Productivity enhancements: Clock and calendar integration is available to manage time across the globe with a single click to set, attend and receive alerts about appointments.

Slick desktop: Ubuntu 8.04 LTS combines the latest GNOME applications with desktop visual effects, giving users a smoother, better-looking and more intuitive experience."

Wow, finally someone has the guts to include Firefox 3 Beta into a OS! On the other hand, the new movie player "sounds" just great, but leaving the free stuff aside, Ubuntu 8.04 also comes with support for commercial software - "more than 30 commercial ISVs plan to support and distribute their applications on the 8.04 LTS desktop platform, including Adobe, Google, Real Networks, Nero, Skype, Corel, Parallels and Fluendo."

Moving to the Server edition, it's worth saying that this new LTS is fully upgradable from the 6.06 release, and the first distro to include Open JDK from Sun as an option. To find out more about it, you can visit the official page, of course.

Aside from the Server and Desktop editions, the rest of the Ubuntu family also got updated, so Xubuntu, UbuntuStudio, and Mythbuntu 8.04 LTS are also available for download since today, too.

These being said, I will pull back and wait for your comments, since I am sure there's a lot to say about this new competitor to Microsoft's failed "Vista experiment..."

Since this is the period when most companies make their quarterly reports public, I thought it would be a good idea to return for a while to Yahoo, and its battle for survival. In fact, Yahoo may have had simply some little problems, because the financial results don't look bad. In fact, they look pretty good, but Microsoft won't increase the bid...


First, let's see Yahoo's results for Q1 2008, shall we? According to the Internet giant, its earnings during the first three months of this year were $542.2 million, or 37 cents per share, more than triple its profit of $142.4 million, or 10 cents per share, one year ago.While Steve Ballmer said "We think we can accelerate our strategy by buying Yahoo and will pay what makes sense for our shareholders," Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang said "Our ability to execute on multiple fronts is clearly improving," so selling to Microsoft is out of question for now.

In the end, it seems Microsoft will move on, and Yahoo will probably get back on track. Here's what Steve Ballmer said regarding this: "We're prepared to move forward without a merger with Yahoo. We think the best way to move forward quickly (and gain critical mass against Google) is to come together with Yahoo. Hopefully that works. But if it doesn't, we go forward. Time is money. We made (that) clear in the last letter we sent."

Well, it didn't work, Steve. That's life! You'd better leave the Internet search market aside and try to give us something much better than Vista with the upcoming Windows 7. Or else...