Showing headlines posted by hkwint

This new release, is firstly dedicated to someone that is not beside me anymore, my dad. The Beta testing team, Luca, our developers and me, agree that is the most perfect, complete and stable version ever released. It's faster, smarter, lightier and comes with a ton of exciting and highly awaited features. It's a tank and you can't do much against it.
[For those who don't know the rather new but very popular (9th on DistroWatch!) distribution SabayonLinux: Sabayon is to Gentoo like Ubuntu is to Debian: Even more bleeding edge than Gentoo, faster, looks better, as first main-distro includes new experimental technologies, like einit. Also, far easier to install than Gentoo. Be sure to keep an eye on this distro, or better, try the LiveDVD. Really a lot is changing at an incredible pace in this distro, and of the main distro's this one is probably the most innovative - hkwint]

LXer Feature: 28-Feb-2007

Linux on OEM desk/laptops is a hot item these days. Dell started to ship corporate desk/laptops without Windows pre-installed lately.

Nonetheless, this is too little and too late, costumers should be able to buy any lap/desktop without Windows pre-installed. Furthermore, the secret trade deals Microsoft made with the OEM's, which effectively make it impossible for / forbids OEMS to ship desk/laptops without Windows - are forbidden.

Therefore, a new pan-European Windows refund action should be started. In this article, I will share my new insights on the legal aspect of this action, since there are a lot of new things I found out after the last article I wrote on the subject. After that, I'll show my plan to do something about it. In short, it reads: Call aunty Neelie and try to get rid of our almost criminal uncles Bill and Steve.

Going by a recent survey by the Forum for Open Source Initiatives in India (FOSII), the Indian market for open source recorded a combined growth of 60 per cent last year. Over 50 per cent growth was reported in open source software and related services.

[ I'm sorry this news is a week old, but I just recently discovered this site, and liked the article - hkwint ]

LXer Feature: 17-Jan-2007

The LA Times wrote a great article about the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Since it is eight pages long, a short summary:
Though most people think the Bill and Melinda Gates is a charitable foundation, this can be doubted. The foundation invests in a lot of companies, and makes as much profits as it gives away. Because it gives away 5% of its money every year, it therefore is a charitable foundation, and therefore they don't have to pay most taxes.

LXer Feature: 16-Jan-2007

The European Commission's enterprise and industry department just released the final draft (warning: 1,8 MB) of what could be the biggest academic interdisciplinary study on the economic / innovative impacts of FLOSS*. The study was done by an international consortium, led by the United Nations University / University of Maastricht's (NL,EU) department of innovation; UNU-MERIT for short. The study was prepared by senior researcher Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, who did a tremendous amount of FLOSS studies the last few years, amongst them on FLOSSpols and FLOSSWorld.

The academic grade study has a very, very broad scope and has collected real world information that is valuable for both companies, government bodies who are thinking about migration, and decision-makers in the ICT business. The study is about the direct economic impact of FLOSS, but also about the more hidden indirect economical impact of FLOSS, and also compares scenarios of open and proprietary software futures of Europe. In addition to that, the study is also about competitiveness of FLOSS software compared to proprietary software, and also provides a few TCO comparison case-studies.

Probably most important, the study gives policy strategies to European government bodies, which can also be very useful for any company or organization. In this article, I'll discuss the key findings of this report, and try to link this with my own knowledge and experience.

A must-read for anyone who's willing to Get the real Facts!

* In contrary to US articles, European's don't mind using the term FLOSS, since English speaking people are only a small minority in today's Europe, and therefore almost nobody associates FLOSS with the dentist. If you do, please don't bother to complain; just change the associations you make.

Fork over $26m while you still can. SCO, whose claim to the Linux kernel has touched off a firestorm in open source realm, is on the verge of bankruptcy, according to court documents filed by legal opponent Novell, several publications reported.

Short comment - A few days back, I read the story "Dell's secret Linux fling". What surprised me is, the people at The Register didn't know this. To show how 'not so secret' this all is, please let me quote an interesting line from the Asianux site;

"As the base software of IT system, Asianux has gotten full support from many global partners including Adaptec, AMD, BEA, CA, Dell, EMC, Emulex, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Oracle, Samsung Electronics, SAP, Stratus Technologies and Symantec just to name a few."

Very secret, huh? I wish it was easier to find out how Linux is doing in the east, but from experience I can say it's rather hard to find out, since sooner or later, you arrive at Chinese-only pages. However, we should still look at the pages that _are_ in English, since they present interesting information. It seems OEM's in the east are supporting Linux, in contrary to what they do in the Western world.

If there are any people from Asia reading this and willing to tell us, the LXer readers and editors, anything about the state of pre-installed Linux-offers in Asia, please let us know. We are eager to find out, and I can promise you I will write a (short) article about it.. Our e-mail address is at the last line of the 'About' page.

When Microsoft introduces its long-awaited Windows Vista operating system this month, it will have an unlikely partner to thank for making its flagship product safe and secure for millions of computer users across the world: the National Security Agency.

[This one is posted only as an example of the drawbacks of closed software - hkwint]

LXer Feature: 23-Dec-2006

Opinion - August 2004, Microsofts Steve Ballmer warned Asian governments that Linux infringes 283 patents, some of which belong to Microsoft, and that those countries might experience trouble as a member of the WTO. However, nothing happened ever since (except more threats). Why doesn't Microsoft sue 'us', the users? Here are some more reasons you might not have thought of before.

Shifting from 19.4% for the week of the 8th to the 14th of April 2006, Firefox user share rose to 23.2% in the week from November 20th to November 26th 2006. Oceania [inc. Australia - hkwint ], experiencing the highest increase (+ 2 points), is now the first continent ahead of Europe in terms of user rate. Firefox is also gaining ground in North America, Africa and Asia (between 1 and 1.9 points), but much more slowly in South America (+0.2 points).

[Even in my conservative country 14%. I wouldn't believe this about three years ago, when Phoeninx, as Firefox was called about version 0.9 if I remember correctly, was far worse than Opera - hkwint ]

LXer Feature: 11-Dec-2006

Mid November, Steve Ballmer said "Linux"uses our [Microsoft Corp.] intellectual property" and "Microsoft Corp. wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation." Many people didn't understand what he really meant, among them the LXer editors. Therefore, LXer sent an Open Letter to the Waggener Edstrom Rapid Response team, and two weeks later, the answers are in (no pun intended). Check the full story for the answers a Microsoft Spokesperson gave us, which hopefully can answer some of our questions.

[ Note: The questions may be a bit clumsy, since sending them was a rather impulsive action. - hkwint ]

The T-Dose foundation presents its first Technical Dutch Open Source Event (the meaning of the acronym T-DOSE) , an event both for Open Source users and developers. The event will be held at the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, near the Belgian and German border. Eindhoven is internationally known as the home of Royal Philips Electronics.
Two rooms will be reserved for speakers from the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and Ukrain. A very broad range of topics will be discussed, ranging from Intellectual Property and Open source, an Open Source project for children (secondary school) to learn about and help create Open Source, to more technical topics as embedded Linux. Also, the LPI will be present, and LPI exams will be taken.

[ - Note: I'll try to be there if I can. It promises to be very interesting, no matter what your specific interests are! - hkwint ]

(See the T-Dose page for more information)

[ - Note: Indeed, this doesn't have anything to do with Linux or Free Software, except for the fuzz about Intellectual Property. Therefore, this story is just added for your reading pleasure - hkwint ]

SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) - Mapuche Indians in Chile are trying to take global software giant Microsoft to court in a legal battle which raises the question of whether anyone can ever "own" the language they speak.

In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle last Thursday, [Steve] Ballmer said "Linux[™]"uses our [Microsoft Corp.] intellectual property" and "Microsoft Corp. wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation."
Now, as a Linux user and editor of a Linux users site, I have some questions about this remarks.

[ I sent the thing to WagEdds Rapid Response Team, look forward to hearing from them - hkwint ]

LXer Feature: 04-Nov-2006

Old news, but still very interesting for our readers: 'De Consumentenbond' (The Dutch Consumer Union) recently said digital security issues (virusses, spam etc.) are too complex for consumers to handle. Therefore, these issues should be handled by professional business, not by consumers. Also, business should be responsible for damage caused by insecure products it sold.

Note: Click on "Read more" for my English summary, click on "Full Story" to go to the story at the Dutch-only site of 'De Consumentenbond'. Parts of it are subscription-only.

Panasas is providing high performance storage to Xinjiang Oil Company to help improve reliability, increase scalability and reduce overall IT costs at the oil company’s facility in western China where aging UNIX mainframes are being replaced with newer Linux clusters.

Sun Microsystems continued its open source push today with the announcement of an independent governing board to set the direction for its OpenSPARC hardware initiative.

Failover clusters are used to ensure high availability of system services and applications even through crashes, hardware failures, and environmental mishaps. In this article, I'll show you how to implement a rock-solid two-node high availability Apache cluster with the heartbeat application from The High-Availability Linux Project. I tested the cluster on Fedora Core 5, CentOS 4.3, and Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS server distributions.

Lately, I read the headline: "Open Source browser Firefox is so critically flawed that it is impossible to fix, according to two hackers." Further on, in the ZDNet article I read: "The hackers claim they know of about 30 unpatched Firefox flaws. They don't plan to disclose them, instead holding onto the bugs."
Since that sounds suspicious, I decided to start searching for connections with MS. Easy enough, here it is:

• 21:30-03:00 ToorCon Saturday Night Party - Sponsored by Microsoft (Link)

Hackers drinking MS-beer for more than five consecutive hours! Judge for yourself...

work in a house with glass walls. Not literally, of course. The cost to air-condition such a house would be prohibitive. I mean that working on standard in OASIS is a public action, with process transparency and public visibility. The public doesn't see merely the end-product, or quarterly drafts, they can see (if they are so inclined) every discussion, every disagreement and every decision made by the TC, in near real-time. Our meeting minutes for our TC calls are posted for public inspection. Our mailing list archives, where most of the real work occurs, is there for the public to view. The comments submitted by the public are also available for anyone to read. This information is all archived from when the TC first met back in 2002, all the way to the discussions we're having today on spreadsheet formula namespaces.

[ Great blog. Go on and read it if you want to know the difference between ECMA and OASIS! - hkwint]