Showing headlines posted by dcparris

Mandriva, now the third-largest Linux distributor behind Red Hat and Novell, is pushing to move from its consumer and small-business market niches into the realm of enterprise IT. Service fees from corporate customers accounted for 30 percent of Mandriva's US$5.5 million in revenue for the fiscal year that ended Oct. 31, up from 10 percent in the prior year. In September, NEC Computers International, a Netherlands-based unit of NEC, said it would bundle Mandriva Linux on the PCs and servers it sells in Europe.

Granted, it's not exactly the Dayton Peace Accords. But Microsoft's Internet Explorer group and the rival Firefox browser team surprised the technology world last week with a small token of cooperation. To be precise, it was a tiny orange icon. Microsoft worked out an arrangement to use the same symbol that Firefox does to alert people when a Web page makes extra streams of information available for subscription.

[Ed: This is the Seattle P-I's take on the Microsoft-Mozilla sharing an icon story. I agree it's not the Dayton Peace Accords - and the use of a mere icon is hardly worth analysis, imo. Microsoft agreeing to include Firefox with all Windows installations would be something to talk about - dcparris]

It seems like a week can't go by without announcements of open source companies cozying up to proprietary vendors, or vice versa. Does this sound a death knell for the independent open source movement? Does it mean that proprietary vendors are using open source products as weapons against competitors? More importantly, can these deals give IT organizations the both of best worlds?

Network specialist Novell, the maker of the Linux distribution SuSE, has announced an agreement with the Federal Government of Switzerland. The IT infrastructure of Swiss public administration will soon be running on SuSE Linux Enterprise servers. More than 3000 servers of the Swiss Federal Government will be running on Novell's Linux server OS upon rollout. Novell was awarded the contract after a public tender.

If the mere mention ofmaster documents brings back memories of corrupted files and lost data, give Writer a chance to show you they're not all bad.

No matter which Linux distribution you choose, there are at least 10 things you do to properly prepare the operating system for connection to the Internet.

[Ed: Not a bad tutorial, especially if you're coming over from the Windows world. - dcparris]

This is the fourth and final set of my observations based on IBM's recent analyst conference from its Software Group. As I have discussed in my previous articles, SOA (service-oriented architecture) now pervades all of IBM's software offerings. Is this a good thing? Yes. Are there unanswered problems? Yes. I have discussed the former in my previous articles; I will now highlight the latter.

It's been a long, bad year for politicians, petrol prices and proprietary software. But 2005 was an exceptional year for open source software. It really found its feet this year, and I think it also started to cement a new façade that will serve it well for years to come.

[Ed: Interesting insight into what's going on 'Down South' - dcparris]

Internet Explorer users are at least four times as likely to click on Web ads than Firefox users, a German advertising technology company said last week. The company, Adtech, found that during October and November, only 0.11 percent of Firefox users ever clicked on an ad, compared with around 0.5 percent of IE users. The percentage of IE users clicking on ads varied depending on which version of the browser was being used, the company said: from 0.44 percent of version 6.x users to 0.53 percent of version 5.5 users. The survey was based on 1,000 Web sites in Europe that use Adtech's ad server.

[Ed: The interesting story here is the reasoning behind the differences. Oh, and watch out for those pop-up ads that redirect you to a malicious site! - dcparris]

Sample code that exploits a hole in Firefox and could allow a hacker to take control of your machine has been released on the Net. The code targets a known hole in the way the open -source browser processes Javascript. Versions 1.0.4 or earlier are affected - so users are advised the upgrade to the latest version of Firefox, released last month.

DALLAS, Dec. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- EDGE Tech Corp (http://www.edgetechcorp.com ), a leading supplier of DRAM and flash memory upgrades, portable computing products, storage devices, and other personal technology solutions is pleased to announce the latest USB flash drive addition to the company's DiskGO!(TM) line -- the new 8GB DiskGO! USB 2.0 Flash Drive. With a sleek silver design, the eight-gigabyte unit is approximately the size of a thumb and can hold thousands of pictures, music files, data files, or documents from a user's computer -- all with one "plug- and-go" step. The unit is priced at $599 and will be sold to the channel and from the company's Web site, http://www.edgetechcorp.com/store/EDGDMDGDISKGO.htm .

Zhongyuan Zheng, vice president of Red Flag Software Co. Ltd. of Beijing, said he believes the next big battleground in China (as well as throughout the world, but in China now) will be the desktop, with desktop Linux continuing to creep in and fight Windows dominance in the country.

Firefox is on fire — and if you are not using this new browser, then you are working too hard. The new 1.5 version is better, faster and offers improved features. It has about 10 percent of the browser market, which is remarkable since Microsoft’s lesser Internet Explorer browser comes bundled with millions of PCs.

[Ed: Nice for the most part, but I don't recall ever having re-installed Firefox after a security update - perhaps he meant *restart*? I have had to install new versions. - dcparris]

The first Firefox 1.5 security vulnerability, made public last Thursday, is not as critical as initially perceived, but a patch will be available to fix it early next year, a Mozilla executive was quoted by IDG News Service as saying.

[Ed: If you run across this exploit (lots of luck) just clear the history cache. - dcparris]

More Than 3,000 Servers Across Switzerland to Run Novell's SUSE Linux

The Mozilla Foundation has issued a security advisory to address concerns about a potential flaw in its new open-source Firefox 1.5 browser which could cause a buffer overflow error.

The GStreamer developers have just released version 0.10 of the GStreamer multimedia framework into the wild, and their coders' fingers will never be the same. Thread-safety, RTP/VoIP support, automatic registry maintenance, twice the performance, and a whole lot more...the best just got better. A highly flexible, cross-platform, and GUI-independent multimedia framework, GStreamer takes your media, chews it up, and spits it out into aural and visual paradise. Especially targeted at GNU/Linux and Unix operating systems, the GStreamer team has been working with members of the KDE community for a long time. With this release we have a stable, extendable and robust multimedia solution. Together with KDE MM GStreamer is set to be the multimedia framework for KDE 4.

Linux is often thought to be inferior to Windows and Mac OS when it comes to multimedia applications. However, by using open source software and a few simple tips, one can easily turn a simple Linux box into a multimedia powerhouse, according to Kyle Rankin, author of the newly published Linux Multimedia Hacks.

There's no chance of the Sony BMG rootkit DM spyware debacle going away. It will echo loudly down many corridors and the University of Calgary's Greg Hagen believes its existence should make anyone thinking about supporting Canada's Bill C-60 copyright act, think again.

[Ed: Canadians in particular may want to pay attention to this one - dcparris]

As further evidence of the expanding role of open source applications in enterprise data centers, Pentaho, a start-up that builds open-source business intelligence software, announced this week that it has received $5 million in series A funding.

[Ed: If business intelligence is anything like military intelligence, I'm scared! - dcparris]