Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

My blogging colleague Robin Harris on Storage Bits poses an interesting question “How should Microsoft respond to very-low-cost Linux systems?” Here’s how - by trying to make cheap systems irrelevant. That’s easier that you think you know. You see, take a look at either Vista or Leopard (it doesn’t matter which) and what do you see? That’s right, a rich, media intensive platform that’s stuffed full of eye candy. It attempts to make low-end systems that can’t handle all the glitz and glamor obsolete.

[ZDNet has some pretty clueless articles at times, but this one is particularly bad. - Sander]

Internationally renowned security guru, Bruce Schneier, will be encouraging technologists at linux.conf.au to take a lesson from Luke Skywalker, and "feel the force" a little more when it comes to security. Schneier, who is CTO of BT Counterpane, is one of the three keynote speakers at the 2008 Linux.conf.au. He joins Python release manager, Anthony Baxter and founding member of HP's Linux division, Stormy Peters. Dahna McConnachie speaks with Schneier about his talk, "Reconceptualising Security" and how technologists need to remember the importance of the human element. He also discusses cyber-war, what Linux has done for security, and the likelihood of another edition of Applied Cryptography.

Let's pretend that we're OEMs. Original Equipment Manufacturers, the people who design and build the actual hardware which finds its way onto desks, into backpacks and under thumbs. We make it run a Microsoft operating system, because that's how we get to all the applications software, and we sell it as a better, cheaper (sometimes more stylish -- but mostly cheaper) way to run Microsoft. But next season is 2008. Suddenly, three things have happened...

This is the most critical step, converting a friend and not doing it right could damage your relationship with your friend, and if not it WILL damage Linux’s image. It will come off as an unfriendly, complicated, and archaic OS. Letting this happen is a disservice to Linux and it’s community and will impede it’s acceptance among others. Word of mouth could make or break any product, ask me I am a marketeer.

Apparently, the days when a computer science graduate student can invent some cool Web software and raise a few million dollars to build a company around it are not over. Brand new (less than a month old) North Andover, MA, startup Acquia announced yesterday that it’s raised $7 million to market software and services in support of the popular Web publishing system Drupal, invented by Dries Buytaert, a PhD candidate at the University of Ghent in Belgium.

One of the things that has been a strong point of Open Source Software (OSS) for years, even if it hasn't been held at the forefront of the battle, is the flexibility that OSS offers. This is something I think needs to be said more these days as our world becomes ever more dynamic, requiring software to be ever more flexible in order to keep up with our ever changing lives. One recent example of this flexibility at work is with the announcement that Linux isn't Y2K(38) compatible. As of right now this is a non-issue as 64 bit Linux will resolve this completely by the time it actually becomes an issue. However, it wasn't too long ago that simple natural software advancement was the cure for a problem.

I’m a very fussy user when it comes to my operating systems and I have managed to get by with Windows XP for a long time, but its days are numbered. Vista is looming and I refuse to install that rubbish, so I have chosen Kubuntu 7.10. Having declared myself a part of the KDE crowd in the long-running desktop environment flame war, allow me to describe how this fussy and long time Windows user upgraded from XP to Linux to avoid the impending doom of XP’s old age and the otherwise inevitability of Vista…

The creator of Linux sees his operating system project as an exemplar of the merits of the open-source development model. In an interview with APC Magazine, Linux kernel developer Linus Torvalds says, "Linux was instrumental in making the whole issue of Open Source move into the mainstream software development consciousness."

The Economist makes three technology predictions for 2008, two of which concern web surfing and the third of which concerns everyone, whether they surf the web or not. The Economist's third prediction is that the technology world will open up. What's most interesting about its analysis, however, is where it sees the biggest impact for open source (Linux) and why (Ubuntu):

I've told a million times by now, that I am a Linux person. I like the operating system, the tools, the applications, the works. I like the process. I like the community. I like the people. And all these positive feelings are not distribution-specific, or "KDE vs. Gnome" or "Is Amarok the best media player?" kind - its genuine people-to-people kind of a thing, and the love for the technology. Recently I got to read more and more stories about Linux in general (at least that what it was insinuated by the name of the article) where term "Linux" is quite replaced by Ubuntu.

Trolltech has recently announced that its graphic library Qt will be using Phonon, he new multimedia library created by the KDE developers. This is good news for Qt4 users allowing Qt to be better and simpler and it's a good sign of a great collaboration between Trolltech and the other Free software projects.

The title of this post occurred to me when I read the post Our Linux Dream. Somehow, even though people get the idea that specialized fields require some experience in that field before you can say anything intelligent about it, people hear the word “Linux” for the first time, Google it long enough to see Tux the penguin, and go “OK, I’m qualified now.” To go through that list of Linux-dream items one by one…

Mark Shuttleworth made news in 2002 when he fulfilled a lifelong ambition and became the first South African to travel into space, paying $20 million to be a civilian cosmonaut on an eight-day flight aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. In 2004, he founded Ubuntu Linux to bring the operating system to people around the world. He is also the founder of HBD Venture Capital and the nonprofit Shuttleworth Foundation.

For developers, the open source world of 2007 was all about updates and interesting new projects. From a new version of Eclipse to a new scheduler in Linux, developers around the world contributed their free time to make their lives and the lives of others collectively easier. But in hindsight, the significance of 2007 may well be that the GPL finally grew some teeth.

The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems. Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 4.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update against http://ftp.debian.org after an installation, in order to incorporate those late changes.

All those Mesirow and legal hours working on the SEC delisting did not pay off. SCO announces today that Nasdaq has sent them a letter. SCO will be delisted as of December 27. They found out on the 21st, it seems, but they tell us today. Here's the press release, where they once again describe themselves as "a leading provider of UNIX software technology and mobile services".

The release schedule for KDE 4 is now clear, and it will be released during the development cycle of Kubuntu 8.04. Since KDE 4 is a major change to the platform, it is not currently at one of these natural rest points so would not be suitable for long term support. Instead, due to the very high interest, development efforts will be directed towards KDE 4 and releasing Kubuntu 8.04 with the option of using either KDE 3.5 or KDE 4.

The development team of VectorLinux have announced the release of VectorLinux 5.9 Final GOLD edition. This is the fruit that has resulted from several months of coding, debugging and testing by the core development team and the Vector community. This release follows our legendary tradition of stability (inherited from SlackWare-12), blazing speed on even modest hardware and simplicity of design and function.

Mozilla has released the latest beta of Firefox 3 today, and the Linux efforts behind it are starting to show even more. This release, being a beta, is surprisingly stable. Here’s the killer that makes this beta release amazing: more GTK support.

It was expected by some. For the third year in a row the Dutch Cartel Office (NMa) decided there were no reasons to look into the Dutch software market, despite requests made by people in the field of commerce and education and by the Dutch parliament. In a letter send to me (and perhaps the other writers as well, link to Dutch text), the NMa explains that there is no evidence to suggest an abuse of the domination market position by Microsoft in such a way that it prohibits other operating systems and software to compete.