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LXer Day Desk: 11-16-2005

If Microsoft offers a superior product to Linux then why would they need a "Get the Facts" campaign? Over the years, the Redmond computer technology firm has learned that buyers make decisions based on who else uses a product. They know executives will say to themselves, if Rayovac uses it, then it must be good enough.

So what do you see? Just about any time a major publication runs a story about Linux, Microsoft gets them to place a "Get the Facts" advertisements nearby and often right in the middle of the story. That seems pretty suspect to me.

Do you ever wonder if publications run Linux stories just to garner Microsoft's ad money? Or have you considered that desperate times call for desperate measures? It makes me wonder.

Diggable

Several Christian Ministers and laymen from across the US and Britain have spoken out against Microsoft's refusal to support OpenDocument, thus leaving visually-impaired users of their office suite effectively unable to use the new standard adopted by Massachusetts. The Christians see Microsoft's stance as intentionally withholding support so that it can turn a technical business decision into a political fight. By refusing to support OpenDocument, Microsoft is ignoring the cross-platform document sharing needs of visually impaired users, not only in Massachusetts, but also in the other 49 states, not to mention the rest of the world. The economically disadvantaged will also suffer from the lack of Opendocument support in Microsoft Office.

Diggable

"Too many of these companies (now forming) are being funded without a community," said Matrix Partners' David Skok in the story. "If a community doesn't form and form fast, then they're going to burn through their venture capital, and they're going to be disasters."

The final release version of FireFox 1.5 is expected today. New features in version 1.5 includes support for SVG, Canvas, CSS3 Columns, Javascript 1.6;

Linux has firmly stamped its authority on the supercomputing sector. The latest report from Top500, which releases a bi-annual report of the fastest computers in the world, shows Linux increasing its market share in this segment from 51.8% six months ago to 74.4%.

A gaggle of new threats that target computers running the Linux and Unix operating systems appears on the Internet.

Anti-virus companies and The SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center advised network administrators to be on the lookout for Internet-borne attacks that target a vulnerability in a common component known as XML-RPC (Remote Procedure Call) for PHP.

Red Hat is listed among ZDNet Asia's 50 Top Tech companies 2006. It is also one of the fastest growing companies with 210.4% year on year income growth over 4 years.

An ambitious new Google Inc. service will let anyone upload most anything to a publicly searchable database, potentially laying the groundwork for a foray by the Internet juggernaut into classified advertising.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Penguin Computing today unveiled the Penguin Application-Ready Cluster(TM) Portfolio, a new line of integrated hardware/software Linux-based cluster systems that provides greater productivity and efficiency in high performance computing (HPC) and commercial data center environments. The pre-configured, pre-tested Application-Ready Cluster Portfolio reduces time to deployment and eliminates the need for many traditional cluster end user and system administration tasks, making clustered computing dramatically simpler and more efficient.

In Cambridge, Mass., Nicholas Negroponte and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been chipping away at a long-held dream: producing a laptop so cheap that governments could afford to link every child in the world to the Internet.

Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has launched its Patent Commons Project with backing from IBM - the industry's largest holder of technology patents - Computer Associates International (CA), Novell, Red Hat, Intel and Sun Microsystems.

So you need a lot of computing power but don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a commercial cluster? Or maybe you just have a lot of machines sitting idle that you would like to put to good use? You can build a powerful and scalable Linux cluster using only free software and off-the-shelf components. Here's how.

David Vignoni, Kenneth Wimer and Nuno Pinheiro, 3 of KDE's finest artists, are very proud to present the Oxygen website, explaining what Oxygen is and the direction it is going in.

It can play games. It can play your Movies. It can play your music. It can view photos. It can read Ebooks. It runs on just 2 AA batteries - And it can do all this in the palm of your hand or on your TV screen.

[ED- Anybody know more about this console? Please post a comment if it is not just vapor and /or any good bstadil]

Will L. L. Bean give its IBM mainframes the boot? Platform Solutions sure hopes so. Platform Solutions' software and firmware product turns Itanium servers into mainframes. It's had an HP Superdome running this code inside Bean for about a year, since December 2004.

Bank of America analyst Kirk Materne cut his rating on Red Hat's shares (RHAT:22.99, -1.37, -5.6%) to neutral from a buy, saying the stock's march upward leaves only moderate room for upside in the intermediate term. While Red Hat's long-term growth prospects are intact, the shares are less compelling for the near-term, he said.

DistroWatch reports - Kalango Linux is a nicely designed Brazilian distribution based on Debian and Kurumin. After some seven months in development, version 3.2 was announced yesterday. The new release includes Linux kernel 2.6.11, OpenOffice.org 2.0, KDE 3.4.3, GNOME 2.10, as well as a number of popular applications, such as the amaroK media player, K3b CD/DVD burning utility, Azureus BitTorrent client, GIMP graphics manipulation software, Inkscape vector drawing application, Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client.

OSDir has some sweet screenshots of Kalango Linux 3.2.

Ark is a Distro well worth trying. While aimed at the new user I believe the experienced user will find it a comfortable and easy change of pace. Everything basically works, the Mission Control Center is a paragon of simplicity, KDE 3.5 is surprisingly stable here and works well. I can easily recommend Ark for both the new and experienced user.

Read more Here

James E. Gaskin writes: "I planned to spend more time playing with the recent Linux distribution from Xandros, Version 3 of Business Edition, but Microsoft caused so many headlines recently I moved this column up. Since the state of Massachusetts and the country of South Korea are pushing Microsoft away, or at least demanding open source document formats, should you dump Microsoft? No, but you should at least take some time and consider alternatives such as Linux and OpenOffice 2.0, especially if saving money matters to you."

[Ed. Aside from being confused about open standards, he at least is willing to point out the cost benefits of Xandros Desktop over Windows. - dcparris]

Novell has backed down on a decision to end support for the KDE desktop on the SUSE Linux distribution, following an outcry from users.