Showing headlines posted by dcparris

The worldwide database market grew 8 percent last year to US$13.8 billion, with Linux and Microsoft SQL Server seeing the strongest momentum, according to new Gartner research.

  LXer Feature: 24-May-06

Steven Titch must be a glutton for embarrassment. First, he writes an article that confuses what few facts it contains. Then, in response to my two articles, one correcting the facts, and the other addressing the difference between fact and fiction, he complains on his blog that I failed to reply to his "central point - that it’s bad policy to mandate open source procurement." He apparently doesn't realize that was exactly the point of my two articles - his central point, which is a straw man, is built on fiction.

Dinotrac writes: "We see the repeated assertion of ODF = OpenOffice and Microsoft != ODF to support a misrepresentation so blatant that we are forced to abandon polite labels like advocacy, exaggeration, and puffery for the naked truth: he's lying."

Steven Titch writes: "While he’s clearly agitated enough to post two responses to one of my recent comments, D.C. Parris, editor-in-chief of LXer.com, fails to answer my central point – that it’s bad policy to mandate open source procurement." Read the rest of Titch's response on his blog.

[It's official. I'm a zealot now. Per Steven Titch, Senior Fellow, The Heartland Institute. - dcparris]

Opinion: People say wikis are wonderful, but really they are just another form of groupware, and not all that useful to most people.

Writer and network operator Kevin Milne has released another freely downloadable science fiction novel about a master hacker who creates the ultimate network penetration tool, a Sharp Zaurus PDA running Linux and special "Z4CK" software. Digital Force is a sequel to Milne's earlier Z4CK, and both are available for purchase or free download.

[Can you guessed what he used to write the book? - dcparris]

In "Acquiring data from the physical world" we examined how to use a microcontroller to turn physical events (such as reading a switch) into data and send that data to a Linux box via the serial line. With this capability you can do things like counting people passing through a gate or recording how the temperature changes over time in a factory process. You can then send the data to a Web page. In this article, we'll do it in reverse -- from a Web form, instruct a microcontroller to perform some actions.

A live CD demontrating Qtopia Phone Edition (QPE) 4.1.1 can be downloaded from Trolltech's website, reports OSNews. Based on Knoppix Linux and the fluxbox window manager, the bootable CD includes software emulators that demonstrate both the touchscreen and keypad versions of the Linux-based mobile phone stack.

...yet another episode of the neverending story on VIA and its (lack of?) commitment to open-source. There's an article over at newsforge.com about VIA allegedly encouraging people to violate the GPL with some of their open-source releases. The person behind these claims is someone quite familiar: Luc Verhaegen who was one of the developers of the UniChrome driver project before it disintegrated. Luc has been the most pronounced critic of VIA's approach to open-source development and his comments and rants on a variety of forums and blogs are rather legendary. You can find his personal blog at libv.livejournal.com

[Hmmm... Is this yet another case of hardware vendors not supporting the FOSS community? Book 'em, Dano! We'll sort out the guilty-innocent issues shortly. - dcparris]

Renesas says it will sample in August a new SoC (system on chip) and development board that support Linux and target telematics and in-vehicle systems. The SH7397 "Euclid" SoC is based on a 300MHz, 32-bit SH-4A SuperH processor, and will double performance of the company's current SH7760 "Camelot" telematics processor, the company says.

The KOffice team today released the first bug-fix release in their 1.5 series. Critical bugs in KSpread, KWord and Krita were fixed, thanks to the helpful input of our users. We also have updated languages packs. Please note that users of Kexi forms are discouraged from upgrading at the moment because of a critical bug discovered too late in the release process to do anything about. We will be releasing 1.5.2 with a fix for this problem within a month. You can read more about it in the press release and the full announcement. A full changelog is also available. Currently, you can download binary packages for Kubuntu and SUSE.

A senior Microsoft executive told a BBC documentary that people should use commercial software if they're looking for stability.

[Go on, read the article. It's not so tilted as it looks - dcparris]

Lately, OSX, or more specifically its kernel, has had a lot of attention. Benchmarks made by AnandTech have shown that OSX' kernel has some serious performance issues. As a result, some have uttered the idea Apple might replace the kernel of the MacOS with another kernel-- Linux seems, to them, the most viable option. Secondly, there have been speculations that Apple is closing the x86 version of its kernel.

Among the biggest news stories at this week's JavaOne conference was Sun Microsystems' long-awaited announcement that it will be releasing the industry-standard Java programming language under an open source license. Java expert Richard Hoffman put together this list of answers to frequently asked questions covering some of the basic history behind this decision, what it means, and why you should care.

  LXer Feature: 22-May-06

Linux News wonders if The Heartland Institute's Steven Titch is a fan of Orson Welles. Find out what his article, "The Dangers of Dictating Procurement" has in common with the 1938 broadcast of "War of the Worlds".

  LXer Feature: 20-May-06

LXer's Don Parris called into question the so-called "research" presented in an article by Steven Titch, a senior fellow at Heartland Institute, regarding the OpenDocument decision in Massachusetts. What follows is his letter to Titch, with the article referenced and linked.

Mandriva Linux released a pair of new services this week. Mandriva Kiosk is a web-based, click-through software installation service, similar in many ways to Linspire's "Click N Run" (CNR), while Mandriva Pulse is the company's new open source system for deploying and managing Linux on large, complex networks, the company said.

The position of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) was today strengthened by the K Desktop Environment (KDE) joining the ODF Alliance. KDE joins other partners such as Oracle, SUN Microsystems, Mandriva, IBM and Junta de Andalucia in promoting the OpenDocument Format as a market leader in document exchange and storage.

DVEO used Linux to build a high-definition MPEG-2 4:2:2 transport stream encoder that compresses HD-SDI video from HD cameras in near real time, and encodes it for transmission over satellite uplinks or cable networks. The NCoder HD targets sports broadcasters, corporate HD videoconferencing, and military applications.

KDE's Portugese translation is showing an impressive amount of green in the translation statistics. To find out more about the man who has helped make our winning translation team People Behind KDE interviewed José Nuno Coelho Sanarra Pires, a 'mood chamelion' who has the best name out of any KDE developer we've interviewed so far.