Even as Red Hat recently talked up its impressive quarterly results, it’s important to recognize that not all of Linux’s success can be seen in corporate financial results. Much of the benefits of Linux comes from unpaid deployments, which continue to account for a healthy margin of total deployments:
Many times I have experienced windows system administrators who just didn’t care about Linux.
These people are not against Linux, they just don’t have very much of an opinion about it.
If I try to convince someone like that, I can take my whole live just trying to convince them to even try it.
But I found a way to make them experience Linux.
Puppy Linux doesn’t require the kind of liposuction required by the meatier operating systems in the Hive Five in order to fit into a nice portable package. Weighing in at under 100MB, it can easily be loaded on everything from a CD to a USB drive with little fuss. The user interface is friendly even for a non-Linux user, and the basic tools you need for popular portable operations like partitioning and file recovery are readily available—although it’s just as great for web browsing and basic computing. We’ve already taken Puppy Linux for a walk, so check it out if you want a closer look at this friendly portable OS.
Linux compatibility. If you’re reading this page, you’re probably concerned in some small fashion with what works in Linux. And it should go almost without saying that older machines, as a general rule, work better with the Penguin than hardware fresh off the boat.
The further you get from bleeding edge, the easier things become with Linux. I nearly pulled my hair out trying to get an errant ATI video card to work with Linux in 2006; two years later, getting accelerated video on that same machine was literally a click-button installation. If you give yourself a small leeway from brand-new, you’ll be better off.
The reason that I’m switching back to Ubuntu is simple: I’m in favour of open systems, open formats, and open source software in general. These are all the reasons that I switched from the Mac in the first place (find out more about that decision here). Long term, Ubuntu is the right choice for me.
Inkscape is my vector graphics application of choice. It can do a wide variety of vector drawing tasks with relatively little effort. It uses the now-standard SVG vector format as its native format, and it has become very extensible through a simple “stream-based”, language-agnostic scripting system. On modern systems, it is reasonably responsive (though not the fastest), and the interface layout is well-balanced and fairly intuitive.
Since I use Inkscape every day and it’s clearly my favorite vector graphics tool, there’s really no way my review of it can be unbiased. So I won’t pretend to be. Instead, I’ll just try to be as complete as I can about the more unique features of the program.
Project management tools encompass many different types of software such as scheduling, resource allocation, collaboration software, quality management, and cost control / budget management. This type of software is typically used by project managers looking to plan and control resources, costs and schedules to meet the objectives of a project.
A few days ago I reviewed Deluge, a powerful BitTorrent client for GNOME, so today I will continue in the same manner with the latest release of its KDE counterpart, the popular KTorrent.
[...]
As a conclusion, I find KTorrent to be one of the most powerful clients for the BitTorrent protocol available for Linux, and definitely the best for KDE users. It gets new features and improvements with every release and it also supports trackerless torrents.
* Guake now features real transparency (as you can see in the screenshot above)
* configurable key hotkeys
* full screen (default: F11)
* multiple tab support
* can hide automagically when focus is lost (recommended !)
So, since Air is coming along nicely (thanks Nuno), it was the time to make the files Lancelot needs for it. Although there are a few things yet to do, I’m quite satisfied with it. I’m even using Air as my Plasma theme now.
Lying about somewhere in my loft, I uncovered a Targa TS30AS laptop, from sometime in the early to mid 1990s. I’d thrown out the battery ages ago, and the machine is almost as old as me, so I had a certain nostalgia using the DOS/Windows 95 system that was installed on it.
Nevertheless, I wanted to see if it could be pushed a little further. The specs of this machine are laughable by today’s standards: 8miB of RAM, a ~75 or 100mHz CPU (a 486DX2) and a 500miB hard drive. This beast is ancient, without doubt.
Fedora 11 has been released for the Beta testers on 31st March 2009 a week later than the scheduled date. This is the first and only Beta version of the Fedora 11 project codenamed “Leonidas“.
Fedora 11 final release, which is scheduled on 26th May, will include several new features and noteworthy improvements, such as RPM 4.7, which will reduce the memory consumption of complex package activity, tighter integration of PackageKit, faster boot time with a target goal of 20 seconds, and reduced power consumption thanks to a major tuning effort.
So this month i decide to give my laptop an apple flavor, God knows how much i hate Macs and some element of their interface, like the lack of right click, most of all the lack of freedom and ownership it and every other proprietary Operating system makes me feel.
And let me say that not the technical fancy “things” convinced me to dig deeper into the Linux universe. The real people, the community, the philosophy behind the software persuaded me to invest time of my life into this project.
Vodafone itself used betavine to enlist those enthusiasts to test a software add-on that enables mobile broadband customers to access the Internet via Linux.
So far, it is quite interesting. On the good side, the boot is very fast. Currently, it takes about 30 seconds, but the ultimate goal of Moblin is under five! The memory consumption is also very low. There were no stability issues. The desktop is simple, yet functional and pretty is a plain, soothing kind of way. You can have Flash working in about 2 minutes. Software updates are also quite easy.
New releases of Mandriva and KDE Desktop are being optimised for a better netbook experience.
Eager to add Penguin-power to your pint-sized portable? While there’s no shortage of distros pared back to suit a netbook or even optimised for a particular model of netbook – such as the Ubuntu-derivative Eeebuntu for the Asus Eee PC family, or Kuki Linux and Linux4One for the Acer Aspire One – some very high-profile players in the land of Linux are working to become more netbook-friendly.
[...]
But don’t go looking for anything like any current desktop. “We’re really breaking out fairly completely from the taskbar concept, as we’re not trying to make a ‘smaller desktop’” Seigo notes.
[...]
“Just as Apple made popular an interface style on handhelds that is for handhelds with their iPhone/iPod touch interface, netbooks deserve a similar treatment. The emphasis in the design is on full screen usage, speed to information, integration with applications and visual beauty.”
As a Red Hat Gold partner, Contegix gradually bet more and more of its business on open source. But if you ask Porter about Contegix’s use of Hyperic, open source is not the first thing on his mind.
A: Yes, Lucid Imagination officially launched in January of this year. We are the first commercial company exclusively dedicated to the Apache Lucene and Apache Solr open source search technologies. We provide commercial-grade support, training, high-level consulting, and value-added software extensions for Lucene and Solr software.
Kors Engineering, a premier service provider for manufacturing and industrial organizations, today announced it is launching a NiagaraAX open source project to develop and share software modules based on the Tridium NiagaraAX Baja API.
The fortunate thing is that I get to warn students in “ece521″ at the University of Alberta that they should pay only enough attention necessary to pass their tests and forget it all afterwards. Then grab The Pragmatic Programmer or this book (even if you don’t do pair programming). Then join an open source project and write some unit tests, fix some bugs and implement a feature or two. Finally, ignore what everyone says about Open Source, just like bad business models (selling less colorful ads on the internet) make profitable companies, less up-front design makes better software (this does not mean NO design).
So what’s the bottom line? if you’re big enough to make it pay, then bringing in open source development expertise connecting your operation to the world wide open source community gives you comparable or better software, better control, more downstream flexibility, and reduced risks – all pretty good things, right?
As I was running through my RSS feeds this morning, Roberto Galoppini pointed me to a post by James Dixon (the CTO of Pentaho) on the Beekeeper Model for Commercial Open Source (PDF).
It references Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm which I’ve used for years to drive our OpenNMS business, so it caught my attention. I haven’t blogged much about open core for awhile, but I thought this article deserved a closer look.
Plone, an open source cms platform that runs on Zope, is planning a World Plone Day 2009. Plone is a free and open source Internet publishing system that combines web content management, social software, collaboration, and enterprise portal features.
Open Source provides a strategic model for extending resources of enterprises large and small, public and private. Technology, support, training, R&D, data feeds, etc., are all provided by a worldwide community of users. These users provide significant input into the product roadmap, testing, quality and ongoing support. What are the risks in Open Source security solutions? How does it compare to commercial alternatives. Will the support and training costs outweigh the savings in license fees and product maintenance?
Boston-based open-source Web meeting company Dimdim unveiled its latest version with features and functionality generally expected from the larger stalwarts in this space.
Proprietary health IT has plenty of representatives here, but open source has several who might be termed persuadable. The future of open source in health IT is still within the power of the President to direct and control.
Defense uses an insurance system called TRICARE managed by a proprietary records system called AHLTA. The Veterans Administration is a single-payer health care system managed by an open source records system called VISTA.
GNU Radio is an open source Software Defined Radio (SDR) project that was started about ten years ago by Eric Blossom, an electrical engineer. The main idea which is behind this project, as its founder says, was to turn all the hardware problems into software problems, that is move the complexity of a radio equipment from the hardware level to the software one, and get the software as close to the antenna as possible.
[...]
The GNU Radio package is provided with a complete HDTV transmitter and receiver, a spectrum analyzer, an oscilloscope, a multichannel receiver and a wide collection of modulators and demodulators.
Sun Microsystems’ xVM VirtualBox desktop virtualization software is now available in Release 2.2, which supports the Open Virtualization Format, or OVF, a public standard.
In 2004, a group from the NIH developed and distributed an open-source alternative to commercial proteomics search programs, entitled Open Mass Spectrometry Algorithm (OMSSA). A second open-source proteomics database search is also now available; the X!Tandem, developed and released by the Bevis Laboratory at the University of Manitoba.
When I wrote about the Lumipro Flashgun (yes, the review is coming), a strobe designed by actually listening to the people who would buy it, I called it ‘open source’ (with the quotes). While, technically, it wasn’t true, it certainly followed the spirit of the project.
Now, there is a true open source flash project. Called the SPOT (Strobist Project Opensource Trigger), it is a wireless trigger for off-camera flash, and by downloading the schematics and GPL-licensed` software, you can build it yourself for around $50.
Scientific Learning Corp. has announced it will contribute neuroscience- and technology-based based activities from two of its educational products to open source program FreeReading.net.
The open source program allows users to access, share, and copy online content legally, owing to what is known as a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License, more commonly referred to as a “wiki” license.
When Congress immunized telecoms last August for their illegal participation in Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program, Senate Democratic apologists for telecom immunity repeatedly justified that action by pointing out that Bush officials who broke the law were not immunized — only the telecoms. Here, for instance, is how Sen.
As part of our campaign “Law Network”, we have organized a conference for April 23 in Rome, the Hall of Columns of the House of Representatives (from 09:30 am to 05:00 pm).
The theme is broad: the aim is to analyze, with all the Stakeholders, the most important current issues related to A proper and efficient development of the digital market.
YouTube has partnered with Universal Music Group (UMG) to launch a new music video service called Vevo. Under their agreement, YouTube will provide the infrastructure for a new site at Vevo.com, to be populated with video from artists on UMG-owned labels such as Decca, Def Jam, Mercury Records, and Verve.
The mention of Comcast could be interesting because of the Microsoft relationship [1, 2], but that’s a negligible or irrelevant part. Surely there will be some skeptics out there who will call DaemonFC “paranoid” and other such words . But we already know for a verifiable fact that Microsoft hires marketing agencies (or agencies that recruit people) for manipulation of information that’s presented in the press, the Web, and the journals.
Whenever people insist that it’s “just paranoia”, the stories above are worth revisiting. It’s not so easy to rub off the past and Microsoft does occasionally get caught. It’s a strategy, it’s not out-of-control employees. █
“Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency, as in, “he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and OS/2.” Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition’s technology part of the mythology of the computer industry. We want to place selection pressure on those companies and individuals that show a genetic weakness for competitors’ technologies, to make the industry increasingly resistant to such unhealthy strains, over time.”
Summary: Spin watch is required as attempts to rewrite past events get noticed
ALEX Brown is pretending that all is fine and dandy with OOXML (he even shows a picture of a smiling face), despite all the OOXML corruption which had people protest out in the streets. André has already replied to end this posturing:
“Over at Rick Jelliffe’s blog Rick has been carrying out something of an exposé of the unfortunate imbalance in the stakeholders represented in the maintenance of ODF at OASIS (something which will become even more acute if Sun is, in the end, snapped-up by IBM). Personally I think Rick is right that it is vitally important to have a good mix of voices at the standardisation table: big vendors, small vendors, altruistic experts, users, government representatives, etc. WG 4 is getting there, but it too has some way to go.”
–> Like in your ISO Committee? I see.
“It is disappointing to see the poor rate of progress on meaningful interoperability and harmonisation work. Of course these things are motherhood and apple pie in discussion – but when the time comes to find volunteers to actually help, few hands go up. In my view, the only hope of achieving any meaningful harmonisation work is to get Another Big Vendor interested in backing it, and I know some behind-the-scenes work will be taking place to beat the undergrowth and see if just such a vendor can be found.”
–> No idea: “Another Big Vendor”. Get me a hint please.
From my perspective the best involvement would emerge from government users who understand that control over document formats is a matter of national security and soverenity. An involvement would usually come from those who have massive free and sustainable capacity, for instance the army, NATO etc. or the foreign office. However, these users would naturally show very little interest in a takeoff of Open XML. Their involvement would guarantee that we move towards an open situation, not an opec one.
The funny thing is that Alex Brown makes it glaringly obvious who he’s with [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21]. A couple of days ago he said this to his colleague, Microsoft partner, and friend whom he attributes in his Web site: “@jlundstocholm Now groklaw has bitten on my ODF/OOXML tweet; true to form, omits to quote the ODF bit when reporting it.” In case it’s not obvious, “jlundstocholm” is Jesper Lund Stocholm [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], who is lurking in the ODF lists while slagging ODF off and bragging about all the traffic he gets for it from Microsoft employees (he wrote about this in Twitter last week).
“If this unethical behaviour by Microsoft was not sufficiently despicable, they did the unthinkable by involving politics in what should have been a technical evaluation of the standard by writing to the head of the Malaysian standards organization and getting its business partners to engage in a negative letter writing campaign to indicate lack of support of ODF in the Malaysian market. Every single negative letter on ODF received by the Malaysian standards organization was written either by Microsoft, or a Microsoft business partner or a Microsoft affiliated organization (Initiative for Software Choice and IASA).“
“It’s part of a continuing behavior pattern by Microsoft that I think it’s fair to call “dirty fighting.” GoDaddy was using Apache (I assume on Linux) because it was a great technical solution. They didn’t switch to IIS on Windows Server 2003 for any technical reason. The switch was accompanied by a press release by GoDaddy, containing Microsoft promotional language. Now, I’ve changed many servers from one thing to another, but I’ve never made a press release about it. GoDaddy wouldn’t be doing that unless Microsoft had offered them something valuable in return. There has been talk in the domain business that Microsoft has been offering the large domain registries a wad of cash to switch their parked sites. There is no other reason to do this than to influence the Netcraft figures.”
[T]he GoDaddy, Google and other Netcraft debacles in the Spring of 2005 and later revealed that Netcraft does everything it can to twist the data in such a way that it increases Microsoft’s webserver percentages and decreases FOSS’s. With that twisting they have been able to make their “reporting” APPEAR that Apache’s server share has dropped from over 70% to 46%, while Microsoft’s has risen from under 20% to nearly 30%.
Deep down in their web site Netcraft concedes that in current “heavily used” websites Apache runs 66% while Microsoft runs only 18%. (See below!) In other words, for example, Netcraft counts the HUGE number of idle Microsoft servers that GoDaddy PARKS, while NOT counting ALL the web servers in Google’s ACTIVE Linux server farm. Their logic for this hypocrisy is mind numbing. They use other similar “metrics” to extend the same distortions.
By comparison, another site which tracks web server market share is SecuritySpace: http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200903/ index.html
which shows Apache’s current share at 71% and Microsoft’s is at 17%. From a dropdown combobox on the same page you can query various domains and countries to see how FOSS and MS compare in percentages. For example, France is 89% FOSS and 8% MS.
As noted before in the context of Apache, Microsoft may be exploiting the nature of Netcraft statistics to promote itself, so this might not be Netcraft’s fault. Nonetheless, it puts in serious doubt any output from Netcraft because its numbers were essentially ‘hacked’ in the sense that they are now being gamed. With regards to uptime, another person points out:
Apparently in both cases, Microsoft offered to the customer “twice the quantity of servers (that normally would be needed in a RedHat/Apache implementation), and twice as many systems admins with full redundant service, “all at Microsoft’s expense”. The aim was to publicly show “reliability, scalability” of Microsoft technology as compared to the more established and respected competition.
I had the same experience as you, GreyGeek. When I found out that Netcraft lost its objectivity (even its appearance of objectivity), and started rigging the numbers in late 2005 to make Microsoft’s net presence look better than it actually was, I lost all respect for Netcraft’s web survey.
Respect for Netcraft is so low now that it might as well just start reporting IIS as having 100% market share across the board. It wouldn’t change anyone’s opinion of Netcraft, so no harm could come from it. The only difference is that Netcraft could stop pretending it isn’t an industry joke.
For what it’s worth, according to Netcraft, Boycott Novell is the 2156th Web site in the world, as ranked by traffic. Although we served over 30,000 pages/day earlier in the week (as judged by AWStats metrics), it’s very doubtful that Netcraft’s traffic rank is not skewed in favour of system administrators. For similar but inversed reasons, Alexa ranks are GNU/Linux- and Firefox-hostile (more Windows/IE-oriented). I wrote about this in my personal Web site, which was at some stage ranked around 17,000th, according to Alexa.
Summary: With Carl Icahn’s endorsement and encouragement, Carol Bartz continues negotiations with Microsoft
THERE IS A LOT of coverage about Yahoo’s CEO resuming her infamous flirt with Steve Ballmer (sample reports are appended at the bottom), but one report stood out from the rest. It was Reuters (via Forbes) about Carl Icahn’s role. He is telling Yahoo to do a deal with Microsoft and he has more than a single seat in Yahoo’s board.
Right from the beginning we’ve warned about Carol Bartz because she is a former Microsoft partner [1, 2]. It turns out that we were right, based on her words and actions since [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; her effect on Yahoo! is similar to that of Carl Icahn, who has been in regular touch with Microsoft whilst he agitated the company and pressured it to sell out to Microsoft. For some background:
Using insiders whom it planted deep inside Yahoo! (proxy fight), Microsoft is hoping to use the company merely as a tool for the destruction of Google. To make matters worse, the abusive monopolist is trying to make exactly the same deal which Google tried to make before Microsoft blocked it. Yahoo was definitely interested at the time (Yang was in charge).
Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz has resumed talks with Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer about possible deals for ads, search or more, according to sources of journalist Kara Swisher. Those close to Yahoo reportedly say that Bartz, Ballmer and other officials have been investigating deals that could not only involve web ad or search partnerships but also future, broader business relationships. One example plan would have Yahoo take over display and “premium” ads while Microsoft runs search ads.
Talk about sheer hypocrisy. “Google can’t, but Microsoft can… pathetic,” wrote trmanco. █
Summary: Microsoft deflects criticism while doing the unthinkable
When a US senator complained that Microsoft had been shafting fellow Americans Microsoft just snubbed him. The company tried to get the man off its back and now we find this:
Microsoft Supports Plan for Undocumented Immigrants
[...]
Microsoft sent a letter to two U.S. senators in support of a bill that would allow some undocumented immigrant students to become permanent U.S. residents if they go to college.
The letter is part of an ongoing initiative at the company to encourage new regulations that will allow more foreign workers into the U.S.
Sent to Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, and Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, the letter backs a bill they introduced called the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act.
Catch phrase like “Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act” bring back memories of Abramoff, who served Microsoft after working with Bill Gates’ father.
As we showed quite recently, Microsoft even insulted lesbians and also a gay employee. Microsoft did not even try to defend itself; it just paid for the man to walk away. Here are some new reports about it:
MICROSOFT is having serious security problems, but it does not respond to this by getting its priorities straight. For those who have not come across the news yet:
The same goes for the IE security update which has not only been marked as critical, but marked as such for Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Server 2008 users.
Could the speculation surrounding the Conficker payload be coming to an end as the latest variant of the virulent worm reveals its hand in the form of links to the Waledac malware family and talk of rogue antivirus installations?
Who will take responsibility for this? It was caused by severe Microsoft flaws that enabled complete compromise over the Internet (no user intervention required). Of course Microsoft denies responsibility; it always does that. █
Microsoft has reached a new level of incompetence with Windows 7. The first time I’ve seen a driver included with an OS that actually corrupts the OS BEYOND REPAIR.
I’m typing this up on Windows 7:
Occasionally I go nuts and decide to see if the people at Microsoft have aped anything good from OS X or Linux, or gotten it right if they did. With all the hubbub about Windows 7, I decided to give it a try, and I was less than amused.
We are hearing that Microsoft has already contacted this reviewer (who is a regular in our IRC channel). The company is very serious about controlling the perception of Vista 7. It’s just so typical.
Vista
Looking at the news on a regular basis, it turns out that Microsoft no longer talks about Vista, so neither do journalists. Articles about “Windows” 7″ outnumber those about “Vista” by a factor of 5 or so, despite the fact that the former is just vapourware and the latter an existing product. The Washington Times has just published the following.
KELLNER: Microsoft’s Vista ought to die soon
[...]
Problem is, however, that the 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate was a dog that wouldn’t hunt, as they say down South.
It is important to remember why Microsoft now ignores Vista like the McCain campaign tried to distance itself from George Bush.
“In the face of strong competition, Evangelism’s focus may shift immediately to the next version of the same technology, however. Indeed, Phase 1 (Evangelism Starts) for version x+1 may start as soon as this Final Release of version X.”
Windows Mobile Users Complain About Upgrade Policy
[...]
While the answers a Windows Mobile executive provided to questions posted to a Facebook discussion provided very little information, the questions posed by 55 fans hint at what users want in the mobile platform.
Aaron Woodman, director for consumer experiences for Windows Mobile, invited anyone to submit questions about Windows Mobile on a Facebook page. When he began posting answers more than two weeks later, his most common response was along the lines of “nothing to announce.”
In general, Windows Mobile is in serioustrouble because it technically fell behind the competition and it’s also a losing division. █
“If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.”
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