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Today Oracle announced a new world record TPC-H 300 gigabyte (GB) data warehousing benchmark for Oracle(r) Database 10g Release 2 and Oracle Real Application Clusters on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, overtaking IBM DB2's best benchmark performance in the same category.

Following the piratical release of 2.6.14-rc2, a brief discussion looked at the advantages of using git to grab the latest version of the kernel code. A small break in service as the master.kernel.org server was situated in its new home [story] caused the 2.6.14-rc2 patch to not show up right away, and led to people pointing out the advantages of using git. When the ketchup script [story] was proposed as an alternative, it was illustrated how git can keep you up to date with the kernel down to a patch by patch level, or with a specific checkpoint. Linus further explained how git can be used to first track down that a bug was introduced between for example rc1-git3 and rc1-git4, and then to use "git-bisect" to further isolate the problem to a specific change.

As for -rc2, Linus noted, "not a whole lot o' excitement, ye scurvy dogs, but it has t' ALSA, LSM, audit and watchdog merges that be missed from -rc1, and a merge series with Andrew. But on t' whole pretty reasonable - you can see t' details in the shortlog (appended)." Evidently Monday the 19'th of September was InternationalTalk Like A Pirate Day.

It's easy to see why Marc Fleury's numerous enemies accuse the 37-year-old CEO of having a god complex. By his account, his 100-person software firm is responsible for a 40% drop in shares of BEA Systems (BEAS) over the last two years. It has sparked at least one IBM (IBM) acquisition. And it forced Sun Microsystems (SUNW) last spring to give away the software recipe to its Web application software.

Oldtyme Unix and Linux geeks love to rail endlessly about the wonders of the command line, and the perfect awfulness of graphical interfaces for system administration. It is true that the full power of an operating system is found at the command line, and that it is difficult for a GUI to include all the available command options and script-ability of the CLI. And running X Window on a server is rather silly — a waste of system resources and unnecessary complexity. But different folks are comfortable with different tools, for example, I can't imagine trying to get along without a graphical file browser. Typing long filepaths and complex commands that can be handled with simple drag-n-drop is not a good use of my time. And even if it weren't more efficient, it's my choice, and by dang that's all anyone else needs to know about it.

Servers running on Linux continue to gain ground in the region, contributing 7.2 percent of the total server revenue in the region, up from 5.1 percent a year ago.Of the top five vendors, IBM continued to lead in the regions pushed by the success of its pSeries. H-P continued to lead thex86 market, with strong demand from China and Australia in particular. Sun Micro-systems' Asia-Pacific server revenue was reduced by its performance in South Korea, but the company performed well in China and Australia.

What a difference a year and $2.6 billion (e 2.1 billion) makes. The renegade cool that once surrounded Skype Technologies SA at past gatherings of the Internet telephone industry has been replaced by mockery and awe at this week's VON show. Nearly every speech or conversation at the conference that opened Tuesday has turned at least briefly to last week's news that Skype, a free computer-to-computer phone service, is being acquired by Internet auctioneer eBay Inc. for an unfathomable sum in this upstart business. The $2.6 billion tag could reach $4.1 billion (e 3.4 billion) depending on Skype's performance.

With Chris Maunder, co-founder of The Code Project, a community site for .NET developers, and Yaacov Cohen, CEO of Mainsoft, a company that offers tools that let users of Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET build applications that run natively in the UNIX, J2EE and Linux environments. The two have teamed up on Race to Linux, a contest challenging developers to port ASP.NET applications to Linux. The first race begins on Monday, Sept. 19, with two more to follow. Check it out at http://www.codeproject.com/racetolinux/rules.

Welcome to this year's 38th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. David Moreno Garza [1]reported that he has closed 729 [2]work-needing and prospective packages bugs which were more than 600 days old with no hope of progress. Branden Robinson [3]posted his ideas and thoughts about managing Debian's trademark with special attention to the [4]DCC Alliance. The [5]m68k port is in [6]danger of being ignored by the testing propagation due to internal compiler errors and a huge backlog of packages.

A critical input validation security vulnerability affecting Linux versions of Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla Application Suite has been reported today. The flaw could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary commands on a victim's system. The bug exists in the Linux shell scripts that Firefox and the Mozilla Application Suite rely on to parse URLs supplied on the command line or by external programs.

“Because the B-MAN components are open source, the system provides a low-cost and highly flexible solution for SMEs, as well as public organisations, to collaborate with other companies and improve the management of contracts and business relationships,” explains João José Pinto Ferreira, the project’s technical manager at Inesc Porto in Portugal. Besides being cheaper to implement than proprietary software platforms, the system also offers several other advantages over existing workflow management techniques.

The Singapore IT industry is one of the most developed in the world, with foreign talent competing equally for local jobs. In the last 20 years Singapore has seen itself move up the value chain and has nurtured a vibrant and cutting-edge IT industry through its razor sharp concentration on training, education and development of its scarce human resources.

The master.kernel.org server was recently moved to a new home at Oregon State University's Open Source Lab, the same that provides hosting for KernelTrap [story]. The master server is where Linus Torvalds and other Linux kernel developers upload files, from where the data is pushed to the main download servers, zeus1 and zues2 [story]. Peter Anvin explained, "this should give much better bandwidth and a more reliable backup solution, in addition to access to a real, staffed NOC."

Since one of the scheduled speakers couldn’t make it because of logistical problems, Eric Allman agreed to step in at the last minute and talk about his latest project, Domain Keys Identified Email, or DKIM. For those of you who don’t know who Eric is, he’s the creator of Sendmail. So when he thinks email needs a new protocol, it’s a big deal. The basic idea is this: we have effective means of encrypting messages so that they can’t be tampered with in transit (PGP, S/MIME). What we don’t have yet is an effective means of verifying that message is from the sender it claims to be from, or of knowing whether we should trust that sender. This is particularly important when attempting to identify spam and trying to prevent the spread of viruses that open up a person’s address book and attempt to replicate using borrowed identities. The DKIM solution is essentially to enforce reverse DNS lookups.

You've decided to automate your web site. Now what? Here are some ideas to help you choose how to automate your site.

Data centers are increasingly making or planning to make the move to environments characterized by Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs), data grids and the use of virtualization technology. But just how will open source technologies fit into this "architecture of the future?" Tony Iams, vice president and senior analyst with Ideas International Ltd. in Port Chester, N.Y., discussed how open source fits in with these emerging technologies today and going forward. Iams led a session on the topic of virtualization at this week's LinuxWorld Conference & Exposition earlier this year.

Oracle has just updated its list of frequently asked questions on Linux in the light of the latest developments and enquiries from clients. Over the past few years Oracle and its customers have learned a tremendous amount about running Oracle on Linux for enterprise class deployments.

Thursday night and I was stumped, as usual, for a topic which would allow me to inflict my opinions on the dogged souls who make it to this page of Computerworld.

I was saved by the Business Software Alliance.

A press release arrived in my inbox, hailing swift enforcement action by the Singapore police who had raided an interior design consultancy suspected of using unlicensed and illegal software. The 10-man Singapore-based company was alleged to have had about $50,000 worth of illegal CAD software installed on its computers.

Here's why the boys from Redmond aren't going to be able to pull it off.

A spate of favorable research notes and rumors of a big customer win pushed shares of Red Hat (RHAT:Nasdaq - commentary - research - Cramer's Take) up more than 5% Tuesday. Volume was heavy. Prudential analyst Brent Thill raised his target price by $4 to $21, saying he expects second-quarter revenue to reach the high end of the company's guided range while operating cash flow should increase by 20% to 33% and deferred revenue by 73%. Prudential does not have an investment banking relationship with Red Hat.

"With hundreds of breakthrough features, Tiger Server is the world's most advanced operating system available today," said Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "EnterpriseDB has delivered an impressive RDBMS that takes advantage of innovation in Tiger Server to support powerful database management features."