Showing headlines posted by tadelste

  LXer Feature: 16-Jan-06

Experienced IT professionals don't buy the Microsoft hype about their R&D investments. GNU/Linux vendors can use Microsoft's questionable selling point to contrast Microsoft's investment in solving perceived problems with the libre software world's investment in solving actual problems.

Ed Scannell of VarBusiness published an scathing article called Cracking Dell's Code last week. He wrote: "Shifting market conditions, poor business decisions and lagging technology are creating fissures in the direct-sales giant--and creating opportunities for solution providers." Two days later Oracle and Sun announced the renewal of their partnership. We believe Dell's luke warm commitment to Linux may make them the first casualty of the open source wave.

Also consider that Dell sold a total of 5 servers priced over $25,000 in the third quarter while HP and IBM sold thousands.

This is the first of at least a two part series. I say that because I hold a stronger opinion today than when I first began formulating this premise. Initially, I had'nt thought out all the implications and due to the interactive nature of this format, I expect further ideas to arise.

Oddly enough, for this one instance I see a modicum of truth in one insult Microsoft throws at Linux. And that's what we'll explore together. Please don't take the polite wording of this editorial as an indication of any uncertainty on my part regarding the premise I will present. The politeness exists only because those involved seem so talented. It caused me some difficulty understanding how they arrived at the point they did.

Read on and feel free to comment with vigor as this conclusion or its consequences is not one to take lightly. Furthermore, the next part may seem quite disturbing.

With the traditional Microsoft news media turning their collective ear to the rest of the industry, you have to suspect a changing of the guard. But Linux companies don't seem to guage their efforts by what the industry says about Microsoft. Linux just keeps chugging along.

So what does the Industry have to say about Microsoft? They say that though many people will swear by the invincibility of Microsoft's ship, it hasn't maneuvered all the icebergs. Collectively, the competition has started ringing up wins. With alternatives in Linux, FireFox, OpenOffice.org and Apple the Microsoft floating casino has begun to list and sway. Here's how and some of it might surprise you.

...according to a 1989 Compute! Magazine article: scan the custom newspaper that spills from your fax; capture segments of a show you like and put them in a video report for school for $1,000; ISDN will simultaneously transmit voice, video, and computer data. You'll talk to your TV set, and it'll customize itself...

[Ed.- Interesting reading. -tadelste]

The MediaReady Flyboy is a Linux-based portable media player. It handles video, MP3s, pictures, and doubles as a portable data story device. On paper, it sounds pretty good. In practice, after a few weeks of playing with the Flyboy, I'm not convinced that it's worth the price tag.

Three years ago, the council paid Microsoft R3 million in an out-of-court settlement. The company had demanded R8 million from the metro for the council's computers to be granted full compliance status. As many as 1 000 of the council's computers had been found to be unlicenced. No licence fees will have to be paid for the new programmes.

The last time I gave Enlightenment a try was almost a year ago when I was using Fedora Core 3. Before that, I used Enlightenment sometime back in 1999 since Enlightenment was the desktop of choice for Linux. Today, I decided to give it a try and find out what has been done since then. All I can say is just wow! It has come a long way with major changes within the development release itself. Explaining what DR17 is about is beyond the scope of this post, this is like what you get when you put composite + gnome + fancy desktop on steroids.

This two-part article explains how to make a Debian package of simple piece of software, presumably something you have written yourself. Although building a new package is more complex than rebuilding one or having one generated, the idea is that it is actually surprisingly simple to create basic Debian packages. In fact, if you can make software install into a temporary installation tree, you're already 90% done! This text provides a quick alternative to the more comprehensive Debian New Maintainers' Guide. Only knowledge of Makefiles and the basic Debian package tools is assumed.

An official MythTV wiki has been created to form a central knowledgebase on all things Myth. P.S. Good news for the open source PVR based community. It looks like mythtv 0.19 will be released in the next few weeks:

The first media bridge for gizmos such as PMPs, PSPs, Digital Cameras, Cell Phones and iPods that will free gizmo users from having to use computers to transfer media files is being released by Unicon Systems. Wired transfers can be made using MCopy and MBridge will allow users to transfer files wirelessly.

Both devices run off Unicon System’s Linux kernel and supports a variety of filesystems supporting USB devices. The platform’s windowing system uses Microwindows Nano-X server which includes a full-screen graphical filemanager, a web server, mysql, php, webdav and xml/rdf libraries.

SUSE 10.1 Beta 1 is now available online and in CD form and is ready for testing, Novell announced Friday. Four Alpha versions of v10.1 have been made available since version 10.0 was released last October.

Saturday, January 21, 2006: Windows 98 runs on 13 per cent of the total 27 million personal computers in South Korea, most of which are being used at government agencies, according to industry data.

The adoption of Linux is likely to accelerate in South Korea replacing Microsoft's Windows 98 in the public sector, sources said recently. Six government agencies held a meeting to craft measures in response to Microsoft's recent decision to stop issuing security patches for Windows 98 starting in July.

CyberLink Corp., a leader in Digital Home solutions, today launched PowerCinema Linux, providing an easy means of converting the Linux PC into a feature-rich TV entertainment center ideally suited for PC vendors targeting the CE market.

The new PowerCinema Linux transforms a Linux PC into an entertainment center featuring analog and digital TV, radio, Teletext and electronic program guide browsing. A launch sequence of about 10 seconds and quick shutdown provide CE-like behavior on a notebook or desktop PC. The stylish 3D interface and operation by remote control ensure easy navigation of additional features, including DVD movies, music, pictures, and video modules.

"Linux is not only a great PC and Server operating system it also runs on a wide range of CE devices and with PowerCinema Linux users can enjoy digital entertainment on their Linux PCs," said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink Corp. "PowerCinema also provides CE device manufacturers with a Linux-based alternative for creating amazing Home Entertainment solutions that can scale down to CE devices with very limited resources. As such, CyberLink is allowing PC makers to move from the typical PC environment to the living room and by doing so to enter the Digital Home Entertainment market."

Webyog has released SQLyog 5 to manage MySQL 5. SQLyog is an easy to use, compact and very fast graphical tool to manage your MySQL database anywhere in the world. SQLyog is FREE for personal and commercial use.

This article demonstrates how to build a small database-driven application: a simple task list web application. This example is short, however it demonstrates most of the powerful features that WASP has to offer. WASP (Web Application Structure for PHP) is a three-tier framework built on PHP 5.

LAHORE: The Tools, Dies and Moulds Center in Karachi will be equipped with 100 seats of UGS’ NX Software for Computer-Aided-Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) Systems for teaching, training and developing human resources for the rapidly growing engineering industry in Pakistan.

Did you know you can search for any phone number with just [phonebook: name here], or can find the weather in any city with just [weather: city name]? Try out the filetype: command with mp3 or avi and see what you get.

The purpose of this guide is to show the process involved in tracing an email. The first step required to tracing an email is finding out the headers of the email. What are headers? Email headers are lines added at the top of an email message that are used by servers as the email goes on route to get delivered. Generally email clients only show the standard To, From, and Subject headers, but there are more.

Friday, January 20, 2006: Net Integration Technologies (NITI) has come up with Nitix that offers the users a Linux-based operating system with automatic capabilities. The product’s self-healing and self-maintenance capabilities do away with the need to have a Linux expert to monitor its operation.