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Gary Edwards of the Open Document Foundation has a fascinating post on the important of Microsoft Office compatibility to the success of the ISO-approved Open Document formats. It is in places a rare voice of sanity. In Edwards’ opinion, there are technical and political reasons why seamless ODF interop cannot be baked into Microsoft Office. Therefore the Foundation is now working on interop with the W3C’s Compound Document Format.

"Basically, what the gcc developers are saying is that gcc is free to load and store to any memory location, so long as it behaves as if the instructions were executed in sequence,"Nick Piggin noted, describing a linked discussion on the GCC development mailing list. He explained his concerns,"for x86, obviously the example above shows it can be miscompiled, but it is probably relatively hard to make it happen for a non trivial sequence. For an ISA with lots of predicated instructions like ia64, it would seem to be much more likely. But of course we don't want even the possibility of failures. The gcc guys seem to be saying to mark everything volatile that could be touched in a critical section. This is insane for Linux."

The Free Software Foundation's (FSF) Free Software Licensing and Compliance Lab held a public question and answer session in an IRC meeting last night. The meeting was conducted by Brett Smith, the licensing compliance engineer at the FSF. Smith began by addressing some of the recent FUD surrounding the GPLv3 license, then moved on to answering some of the questions and misconceptions regarding it.

This past Sunday we started our first-ever Linux Graphics Survey that looked at the usage of X.Org display drivers, hardware, and the display features being sought after by Linux desktop users. In less than four days, we received over 10,000 survey submissions! This survey will be going on until November 21, so if you haven't yet participated you still have plenty of time to do so. But for those of you that have already taken the survey, what are the results so far? Well, below are the percentages from all of the responses collected before 10:00AM PST today. In Late November when the survey has ended, we will present the final results.

During a session at the 2007 Online News Association conference in Toronto, Canada, I had a chance to point my video camera at Forbes columnist (and Fake Steve Jobs blogger) Dan Lyons. He told me that people who say he dislikes Linux are not being fair to him; that out of 70 articles he's written about Linux, 67 have been positive, and he absolutely denies that he is paid by Microsoft to write what he does about Linux, Apple, or anything else.

"It is AMDs duty to release both specifications and drivers for their cards. It is the ONLY ethical and fair thing to do. So to be happy that they released specs is like a chained man being happy for having its one arm being unchained even though the other is still tight under lock."

The key to Kalbach's expertise in writing this book is his current role as a Human Factors Engineer at LexisNexis. For those of you who don't know, Human Factors or Usability is the study of how well web users with varying degrees of experience and skill are able to maneuver through your website. While you may think you've designed and launched a really cool website or the average home user, if my Mother can't figure out how to get from the home page to the product page she wants to look at or can't find her way from the product page to where she needs to go to either download a demo or get to the shopping cart, you're website turns out not looking so cool.

Fire up the De Lorean Marty, we've got to go back and correct the Linux time line!

Listening to the music played back from original audio CDs on a home computer creates clear discomfort — the CD drive is being blocked and the CDs have to be changed again and again (unless you have a home jukebox). Now it’s time we learn to rip (grab) our own audio collection and save it to a hard disk in the form of .mp3, .ogg, or .flack files.

Since version 5, MySQL comes with built-in support for master-master replication, solving the problem that can happen with self-generated keys. In former MySQL versions, the problem with master-master replication was that conflicts arose immediately if node A and node B both inserted an auto-incrementing key on the same table. The advantages of master-master replication over the traditional master-slave replication are that you do not have to modify your applications to make write accesses only to the master, and that it is easier to provide high-availability because if the master fails, you still have the other master.

With two fresh Eclipse offerings, the Eclipse Foundation member Gentleware AG further expands beyond UML to delve deeper into model-driven software development.

Can the SCO Linux wars get any crazier? Err, yes, of course they can :)

Last week we learned some useful tips about font management in Linux. Today we're going to learn a few more ways to preview fonts, how to view font character maps, how to manage console fonts, and how to design your own fonts.

After noticing the Google Trends from a lifehacker post, I decided to check out how well Linux is faring against windows. Initially I compared Linux and Windows which gave a huge difference for windows. This is understandable since Linux is not the main environment but rather the core. I then decided to check the actual desktop that someone might use, and the result were interesting

Canonical this month released Ubuntu 7.10, codenamed Gutsy Gibbon. Like the Feisty Fawn release before it, Gutsy is a bleeding-edge distribution with a focus on new features and the newest free software applications. It's a speedy operating system with great new features and only a few minor issues. Ubuntu comes in three main flavors. Ubuntu features GNOME as its desktop, Kubuntu uses KDE, and Xubuntu ships with Xfce. Other derivatives of Ubuntu include Gobuntu, which contains only free software and no closed source elements, and Edubuntu, which was designed for use in classrooms.

Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, will be in South Africa next month to promote the growth of the online encyclopedia in the country's various local languages through the launch of two Wikipedia Academies.

This article explains how you can install all the multimedia codecs to play any music or video file in Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.

Conclusion: At the end of the day Linux is all about choice. For developers and power users this is a good thing, as it lets them set up things exactly as they want to have them. Unfortunately average users have to take a back seat because the practicality of the interface doesn’t take a high enough priority. In this way the lowest common denominator isn’t appealed to, users either have to learn to use or completely avoid Linux. This is in contrast to Windows, where things are designed with the average user very much in mind. OS X attempts to make the best of both worlds, making accessing programs easy but providing a bit more under the hood, without the flexibility of choice. By virtue of choice alone Linux may be the best option if neither Windows nor OS X sit right, and as it gets easier and easier to install it should become a more and more viable option.

Alan Cox emailed me this morning to note a presentation he gave way back in 2000 called "Dear Mr Brooks, or: Software engineering in the free software world." It's no surprise to me that my recent blog post (on the topic of optimally sized development teams) was better articulated by Alan many years ago. What was surprising is just how prescient Alan's talk was. And how informative. For anyone who has ever wondered how open-source software development works compared to proprietary-software development, this is an absolute must read.

Yesterday, Buffalo Technology and the German-based New Media Net published a press release claiming that from now on, you can buy Buffalo’s WHR-HP-G54 Router with the open source DD-WRT firmware. You’ll get the usual 2-year guarantee here in Germany, which you would lose with installing free software on most vendors’ products yourself.