Showing headlines posted by bigg

Attachmate Corp., an investment group including Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo, agreed to buy software maker Novell Inc. for about $2.2 billion in cash. Novell investors will get $6.10 a share, Attachmate said in a statement today. That’s 9.1 percent more than Novell’s closing price on Nov. 19. Novell will also sell some intellectual- property assets to a group technology companies led by Microsoft Corp. for $450 million.

So hats off to Red Hat, whose chairman Matthew Szulik is the subject of this week’s Global Business. Red Hat is built on the computer operating system software system Linux, devised 19 years ago by the Finnish developer Linus Torvalds, and then worked on by thousands of collaborators all over the world, to become a plausible free-to-use option instead of the big brands of proprietary software. Red Hat has found a way of making money out of selling free software, as the company puts it. It attaches paid-for support or structuring services to the Linux operating system, bringing confidence to business users of software which they would otherwise be nervous of replying on.

Through the Web, Matterhorn members from around the world will develop "open source" software designed to automate their recording and posting of academic content, making the process less costly and labor intensive. The $1.5 million in funding for the project includes $220,000 for planning and design activities that have taken place over the past year.

Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE (London Stock Exchange)'s Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day. While the LSE denied that the collapse was TradElect's fault, they also refused to explain what the problem really wa. Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect.

When you buy a new computer, you may first think about its operating system — is it PC, Mac, Linux? Smartphones have those same operating systems and others. But the OS isn’t likely to be the No. 1 issue for many consumers even though it’s playing an increasingly important role. Smartphones — which can handle e-mail, Web browsing as well as audio and video in many cases — have seen strong growth this year as more consumers opt to have their cell phones do double and triple duty.

You might just be thinking that we need another browser like Medieval Europe needed the Bubonic plague, but I’m always a great fan of the different and new, of people doing their own thing. Even Firefox had to start somewhere. H3v is a relative newcomer to the browser pack and it definitely falls into the “lean, mean” category. I think it deserves a little more exposure.

The computer proletariat is rising up - and computing will never be the same. Tiny, sub-$500 "netbooks" like the Asus Eee are the hottest thing going in notebooks today. And some surprising things are happening. Like housewives on Linux. Asus is forecasting worldwide shipments of 10 million 7 to 10 inch screen netbooks this year! And a billion in 2018.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has marked a milestone in their PlayOgg.org campaign with the announcement that National Public Radio (NPR) news station WBUR Boston has begun worldwide webcasting in the free audio format Ogg Vorbis.

European Union regulators fined Microsoft Corp. a record 899 million euros ($1.35 billion) for failing to comply with a 2004 antitrust order, the largest EU fine ever imposed against a single company. Today's fine brings the total penalties against Microsoft to 1.68 billion euros in the case.

Arch Linux, which was inspired by the CRUX is an i686 optimized lightweight distribution with a great package management tool. Arch releases usually contain a core cd image (~160 MB) that has a core system without any graphical servers and an FTP install image (~30 MB) with which you can install the entire OS from an FTP server. I decided to try arch as it seems to be one of the fastest and highly customizable distribution around(The real reason was since arch seems to be more of a "geek's distro" , I thought I could check my "geek level" with it :) ).

The good news for everyone is that you can get a good, solid laptop for under a grand these days. The bad news for Vista users is that many of those laptops, even though they're sold with Vista, have nothing like enough resources to run Vista decently.

With its legal options running out, Microsoft bowed today to pressure from the European Commission and agreed for the first time to sell some confidential computer code to rivals at nominal cost, ending a 32-year-old practice of designing closed systems to bolster its competitive advantage.

Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos said Thursday his company did not agree that its Linux distribution violates any Microsoft patents nor did the software giant ask Xandros to do so as part of the patent cross-licensing deal the two signed Monday.

Much has been written about Microsoft’s allegation of patent infringements in Linux (by which I’m sure they mean GNU/Linux ;-) ). I don’t think Microsoft is the real threat, and in fact, I think Microsoft and the Linux community will actually end up fighting on the same side of this issue.

Roberto Moreno was on the bubble, although not necessarily in danger of missing the Indianapolis 500. But instead of waiting to see what the likes of Jimmy Kite or P.J. Jones could do in their unqualified machines, the 48-year-old Brazilian took his status into his own hands, pulling a slow speed off the board and replacing it with a stout effort better than those of a half-dozen cars on the grid.

Although I'm still satisfied with my place in the Microsoft development universe, some developers desperately want off the Microsoft treadmill. Mike Gunderloy is a notable example:

I kept coming across these claims that Microsoft and OLPC had partnered to put Windows XP Starter Edition on the OLPC, and according to one report, this was being done to get the XO laptop into US schools. None of this jibed with what I had been hearing from sources, so I decided to look into it further. As it turns out, a number of new outlets, including the AP and Reuters, mischaracterized the situation.

Officially, Dell Inc. hasn't said a word yet about which Linux it will be preloading on its desktops and laptops. Several sources within Dell, however, have told DesktopLinux.com that Dell's desktop Linux pick is going to be Ubuntu.