Showing all newswire headlines

For a long time I have tested many different virtualization techniques; Xen, VMWare, and Microsoft VM. Until now I’m able to conclude that all of them are usable on my desktop machine, but both VMWare and Microsoft’s VM are more sluggish that Xen. This weekend I deployed my first server based on the upcoming Debian Etch and Xen. Everything worked out of the box.

Linux-based application platform vendor Trolltech expects a higher growth rate in the second half than the first six months but said growth for the full year may fall below the approximately 40% recorded for each of the three previous years.

I plead guilty to past transgressions. So, call me a hypocrite if you will. I don't care anymore. I refuse to get stuck in the past because the present and the near future is fun.Indulge if you will in recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images experienced as intrusive and distressing. The obsession with Microsoft in Open Software communities is excessive and unreasonable and a product of the mind. My only hope is that such thoughts, impulses, and, or images can be expunged by logic or reasoning, which is contrary to the notions in the psychiatric community.

Late last night Ars Technica started receiving reports from readers experiencing problems with Windows Genuine Advantage authentication. Windows XP and Windows Vista users wrote to say that they could not validate their installations using WGA, and one user even said that his installation was invalidated by the service. Microsoft is telling users they should "try again" later, with some support techs telling readers that Microsoft is aiming to have a fix in place by Tuesday, August 28.

When Microsoft announced its plans to build a brand new hypervisor into a future version of Windows Server, it seemed to me that a much simpler path to baking virtualization into Windows would be to join the ranks of vendors developing and shipping products around the open-source Xen hypervisor project. Microsoft must have judged that relying on an outside source—and a General-Public-Licensed one, at that—for a piece of technology as central as a hypervisor would be too risky or uncomfortable, leading the Redmondians to opt instead to go it alone.

In the continuining discussion about how GCC treats the volatile keyword, Linus Torvalds noted, "I just have a strong suspicion that 'volatile' performance is so low down the list of any C compiler persons interest, that it's never going to happen. And quite frankly, I cannot blame the gcc guys for it." He went on to explain, "that's especially as 'volatile' really isn't a very good feature of the C language, and is likely to get *less* interesting rather than more (as user space starts to be more and more threaded, 'volatile' gets less and less useful."

Doctor Daniel Mashao, the chief technology officer at Sita, announced the launch of the government-wide free and open source programme at the GovTech conference on Thursday.

The problem isn't just silos and walled gardens — our names for choiceless dependency on one company's goods and services. The problem is the defaulted belief system that gives us silos and walled gardens in the first place. In that system suppliers believe that the best customers and users are captive ones. Customers and users believe that a free market naturally restricts choices to silos. It's a value sytem in which VCs like to ask "What's your lock-in?". Even in 2007, long after the Net has become established as an everyday necessity, we still take for granted the assumption that living in a "free market" is to choose among jail cells. May the best prison win.

Jabari Zakiya wrote an article headlined “Beware of Skype” in the Free Software Magazine. He suspects that the recent outage of the Skype network had to do with the US of A’s revised Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), something which is planned (and soon done) here in Germany as well: the spying of the state onto its local citizens.

This is a kind of part two so to speak of an earlier blog entitled Freedomware. In my previous blog I talked about some of the reasons why FOSS development seems to just work so well. This time around I want to talk about an interesting thought I had in regards to answering the common question of... "why is it free?" I used to reply it is free as in freedom... to which they respond with a pause a blank stare before they either say "really" or change the subject. I have not even touched on the reaction I get when I tell them that I do not need to worry about viruses and spy ware. Why is freedomware free as in $$?

Grassroots public relations campaign aims to get GNU/Linux mentioned on radio talk shows.

I am happy to announce that version 1.5 of the WinOSSCDRom is ready to download. The WinOSSCDRom is a collection of free and open source software for the Windows platform. For more info and download links please see http://www.winosscdrom. com

Ubuntu developers have taken the wraps off the fifth update to the upcoming "Gutsy Gibbon" version, a major release that will include significant additions to the Linux distribution. Developers have been releasing "Gutsy Gibbon" builds since May, but the "Tribe 5" alpha release this week previews many of the significant features planned for the final release when it appears in late October.

In Linux circles, Microsoft's anti-Linux site, Get the Facts, was better known as Get the FUD, and was seen as more of a joke than a convincing argument in favor of Microsoft products over Linux. Microsoft may have come to agree that the site was not serving any useful purpose, as the company closed it down on Aug. 23.

As you may know, the Executive Board (EB) of INCITS, the US voting body on OOXML in the ISO/IEC JTC1, posted two simultaneous, seven day written ballots - one to approve, with comments, and one to abstain, again with comments. The votes have now been received back. and are as follows:

to Approve, with comments: 12 for, 3 against, 1 abstaining (six with appended comments).

Abstain, with comments: Unanimous Meanwhile, becoming a voting member of ISO/IEC JTC1 is suddenly becoming very popular.

It's the big problem of the net: how do you make money if everyone can access the files you produce for free? Earning money is not evil, it makes it possible to produce more art or information. It's a waste of talent to need a day job to support what you consider your real work.

After publishing an article about removing backgrounds quickly in Photoshop, many have asked me how to do the same thing with the Gimp. While there is no equivalent to the Extract filter in the Gimp, you can still remove backgrounds fairly quickly. Here, I will show you how to do it with the Create and edit paths tool.

"The elections for five of the ten members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board[TAB] are held every year, currently the election will be at the 2007 Kernel Summit in a BOF session," James Bottomley, the TAB chair, announced on the Linux Kernel mailing list. He noted that this voting session would be held on the evening of September 5'th or 6'th, providing an email address for sending nominations and adding that anyone is eligible, "only people invited to the kernel summit will be there in person (and therefore able to vote), but if you cannot attend, your nomination email will be read out before the voting begins."

ESTO is a tool that tunes the set of parameters for optimizing a specific target program. Expert System for Tuning Optimizations (ESTO) is typically used for tuning, for maximum performance, the optimization options used by a compiler when creating an application. ESTO is currently geared toward tuning GCC and Post-Link Optimization for Linux on POWER.

Databases are happy to handle many parallel requests. However, active processes (threaded or forked) almost inevitably eat up a valuable resource: database connections. Learn how to use the antipool.py module in Martin Blais' antiorm library to make the pooling and reuse of connections transparent to programmers, and in a RDBMS-agnostic fashion.