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  LXer Feature: 14-Jun-06

Steven Titch, a Senior Fellow at the Heartland Institute, first drew my attention when I ran across an article he wrote, in which he made so many misleading statements, I called into question his abilities as a researcher. Two blog posts later, Titch still fails to address facts, to present any evidence in support of his arguments, to make any arguments relevant to the issue at hand, contradicts himself... Need I go on? One wonders if he is even in the same ball park.

Microsoft executives will announce a software donation today that would give students in Massachusetts universities and high schools some of the latest technology, including the ability to write their own software and build websites.

[Aren't there laws against trying to get students addicted? Isn't this the same Boston Globe which smeared Peter Quinn? Isn't this the same Microsoft who has historically threatened, squeezed, and even lied to schools? By the way, any GNU/Linux distribution permits students to "write their own software and build websites" without all the auditing, licensing, and viral problems associated with Microsoft. -- grouch]

Click Sentinel, a commercial antifraud application that's been on sale for more than a year, has just been converted to a free-software model. In addition, the new 2.0 version runs on your own machine, keeping your data private, whereas the older version required a remote server.

[While it claims to be "totally free", I couldn't find any way to download without registering. -- grouch]

The Department of Science and Technology-Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI) will soon be launching the next desktop and server versions of the Bayanihan Linux operating system.

InTech Solutions accelerates US presence for leading open source collaboration vendor

Arcom's new Development Kit allows faster and easier development of a wide range of embedded devices in a Linux environment. The kit's SBC-GX533 board has a compact Arcom Embedded Linux image installed in its onboard Flash. All onboard hardware features are supported, allowing unrestricted access to their functionality, while all unnecessary software functions have been removed, leaving a compact image of just 13 MB. This can save weeks or even months of development effort compared with configuring a Linux image from scratch.

Linux Networx, The Linux Supercomputing Company, today announced that it is applying its industry-leading supercomputing expertise to the delivery of a series of innovative application acceleration solutions expected to deliver up to 4x the price/performance value of current application accelerators for key applications.

The Board of Trustees of theFreeMED Software Foundation, INC is pleased to announce that Sanjay Udoshi, MD of Wilkes-Barre, PA has accepted the position of Secretary to the Foundation Board.

Dr. Udoshi has been active with the development of FreeMED and promotion of Open Source for use in medicine and medical practice.

Quick -- name a company that has invested heavily and continuously in open source, is one of the top contributors to Linux kernel development, and offers full enterprise support for Linux to thousands of customers.

A popular application server benchmark, featuring a complete open source software stack with MySQL 5.0 database, the Solaris 10 Operating System, and Sun Java Systems Application Server 9.0 Platform Edition (Project GlassFish) has shattered the competition by offering up to 8.6 times lower cost of acquisition than the comparable solution, according to the benchmark test results

"Can open source save your life?" by Dana Blankenhorn at ZDnet. Nice overview, with pictures, and comments by Medsphere's Scott and Steve Shreeve. Good to see in this in the mainstream media (ZDnet anyway!)

Oracle Corp has launched details of a number of new validated Linux configurations that it said will help reduce deployment time and increase reliability for users.

Digital Focus Supports Professionals in the Information Technology Industry

eWeek.com this week ran a story entitled "Can Windows and Open Source Learn to Play Nice?" The opening paragraph of that story, written by Peter Galli, reads "Microsoft has been reaching out to the open-source community to try to find ways to overcome the incompatibilities between software distributed under the GNU General Public License and its own commercial software." Anytime I read of Microsoft "reaching out" to someone, the hackles on the back of my neck appear and I hunker down into a defensive position.

Security and storage management vendor Symantec has announced an agreement with IBM involving delivery of Symantec high availability, storage management, and backup products for the Linux on POWER platform by the end of 2006. The solutions target clients consolidating Linux applications on the IBM System p platform.

[Say, isn't Symantec suing Microsoft? Is there a trend here? - dcparris]

Opinion: Microsoft cuddling up to open source is something like a snake cuddling up with a rabbit.

A colleague had a defective harddisk in his personal laptop, so I told him to get a new one. When he came back with his shiny brand-new 2,5″ Samsung harddisk, he wanted Windows XP or better - so I installed Debian Etch…

We will hopefully soon switch the default python version in sid from 2.3 to 2.4. With the upcoming releases of the last packages which didn't support 2.4 yet (Plone on the Zope application server) we may be able to drop support for 2.3 in sid and etch as well.

There are so many desktop distributions that I often find myself testing them like I'm looking for the Holy Grail and forgetting what I really want: An operating system for my daily tasks at home. I found my Grail in Zenwalk, a Slackware-based Linux distro that uses the lightweight Xfce desktop environment along with an up-to-date 2.6.16 kernel.

What percentage of Internet users are Firefox users? There's no easy way to answer that question, since so much depends on how you do the math. (Here's a site that says it was 10.56 percent in May; here's another that says 11.79 percent.) Me, there's only one site whose visitors I can talk about with any authority--PCWorld.com, natch--and after a long period of stability, it looks like Firefox is seeing an uptick in use hereabouts.