Showing all newswire headlines

When you published your article, "Massachusetts Should Close Down OpenDocument", you made an error. You let someone from the Americans for Technology Leadership influence your fair and balanced reporting. Well, the story is unfair and unbalanced. Get Bill O'Reilly on the phone and have him talk to Tim.

So, here are our talking points.

(Note: For those readers who have never seen the Bill O'Reilly show on Fox, this is a parody of how he opens his show.)

Now that a laptop with pre-installed Mandrake Linux is available in France, will Dell follow up with Linux laptops in the US or other nations? In the words of Dell CEO Michael Dell, the many distributions of Linux are too "alienated" from each other to make that work.

Want to test-drive the Firefox 1.5 beta and bring most of your favorite extensions along for the ride? We'll show you how to make your brand new Firefox update less picky about installing extensions -- and explain why doing so isn't always a good idea.

Sun irrevocably covenants that, subject solely to the reciprocity requirement described below, it will not seek to enforce any of its enforceable U.S. or foreign patents against any implementation of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification, or of any subsequent version thereof ("OpenDocument Implementation") in which development Sun participates to the point of incurring an obligation, as defined by the rules of OASIS, to grant (or commit to grant) patent licenses or make equivalent non-assertion covenants. Notwithstanding the commitment above, Sun's covenant shall not apply and Sun makes no assurance, covenant or commitment not to assert or enforce any or all of its patent rights against any individual, corporation or other entity that asserts, threatens or seeks at any time to enforce its own or another party's U.S. or foreign patents or patent rights against any OpenDocument Implementation.

By my count, there are one million, two hundred and seventy thousand, and four hundred and seventeen Linux distributions. Nah, I'm kidding. There are only, by my quick count, one hundred and forty one Linux distributions. Currently shipping. For the Intel platform. In English.

Internet visionary Marc Andreessen has taken an interest in PHP (define), an open source programming language some consider a threat to languages, such as Java and Microsoft's Active Server Pages and .NET. The Netscape co-founder along with Informatica Founder Gaurav Dhillon joined the board of directors at Zend Technologies, the top provider of PHP software, services and technical support. The company's two co-creators are the authors of PHP 3, which is what all subsequent versions are based on.

See how Linux can be used to prototype a sophisticated Internet appliance.

An R&D affiliate of the world's largest telephone company has achieved a stable release of a new Linux filesystem said to improve reliability over conventional Linux filesystems, and offer performance advantages over Solaris's UFS filesystem. NILFS 1.0 (new implementation of a log-structured filesystem) is available now from NTT Labs (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone's Cyber Space Laboratories).

Knowing a little bit about how the Linux 2.6 scheduler treats CPU affinity can help you design better userspace applications. Soft affinity means that processes do not frequently migrate between processors, whereas hard affinity means that processes run on processors you specify.

Wikibooks, sister project to Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia that can be accessed and edited by anyone, has been introduced. Previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks, Wikibooks is a collection of free textbooks, manuals, and other texts, with supporting book-based texts, that is written collaboratively on the website. It works on the same principal as Wikipedia, meaning that anyone can edit any book module by clicking on an "edit this page" link, which appears in every Wikibooks module.

Sun Microsystems must have figured digital rights management (DRM) never sounded so good when it recently announced a call for partners in its quest to use open source DRM to "compensate rights holders and stimulate innovation," but Sun's open DReaM (DRM everywhere available) Project is as scary as any other content control nightmare to open source and digital freedom proponents.

An agency of the French Ministry of Defence is planning to install a high-performance Linux cluster for technical and scientific work. The Technical Establishment of Bourges (ETBS), which tests and manufactures armaments, has issued a tender for the supply of a 64-bit Linux cluster, according to a document on an EU website. The deadline of the tender was reached on Thursday but it was unclear from the tender document when the ETBS plans to start implementing the cluster.

Linux, Apache Web server, MySQL and PHP - the widely used LAMP platform - are key parts in a recently-built voicemail system that is helping displaced residents of the Gulf Coast keep in touch with family and friends around the country. LAMP technology is the engine running contactdlovedones.org, a project that provides freely accessible voicemail services to people who had to evacuate their homes due to Hurricane Katrina.

SearchEnterpriseLinux.com caught up with Featherly to talk about his new book and to get his thoughts on where Linux and the open source applications market is heading. The author also offered tips for SUSE administrators and developers, those comparing KDE and GNOME, and those mulling the deployment of JBoss with SUSE. Featherly, who in addition to being a writer is currently a consultant with HP Services and Consulting Integration Group, is a 20-year veteran of the IT industry.

Only two years into its development, a new version of Linux is generating considerable excitement.

Just found this (of all places, on Novell's website - you'd think someone would have shared this with me...?). As the IDC analysis goes,

IDC expects Linux to continue biting at the heels of Windows market share and increase from 24 percent to 33 percent within two years forcing Microsoft to swallow even smaller profit margins just to hold on to their share

Many businesses are turning to Voice over IP (VoIP) to save money on infrastructure and communications costs, but just ripping out your existing phone system and replacing it with VoIP will not work. VoIP systems require IP phones or analog telephone adapters to allow your existing phones to work. If equipment costs are stopping you from experimenting with VoIP, softphones can provide an inexpensive way for businesses to get up and running with VoIP, as I recently discovered by putting Kiax, Linphone, Twinkle, and CounterPath's X-Lite to the test.

Kontron is sampling a mini-ITX board that supports Linux and targets cost-constrained, high-volume applications such as gaming, POS (point-of-sales/service), data communications, and medical equipment. The 786LCD/mITX is based on a mature Intel chipset and low-voltage processor, yet supports USB 2.0, SATA, FireWire, and LVDS, Kontron says.

IBM has supported Linux for some time, and Dell's recent announcement that it is now shipping servers with the open source Web platform LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is yet another indication that open source is entering the corporate mainstream. Even so, some IT managers are still reluctant to use open source products. This book is the perfect antidote. You won't find any rants here — just a reasoned and prudent assessment of open source products, how to evaluate them and determine if they suit your organization's needs.

But I strongly believe that Linux users badly need the kind of automated anti-viral patch management service that Windows users now take for granted.