Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Brazil often makes Linux-related headlines, the latest being the adoption of KDE in Brazilian public schools. It’s clear that Brazil is enamored with Linux, but why? This is an important question for Microsoft since emerging markets are key to sales growth. Microsoft’s Annual Report 2007 reported that “impressive growth included India, China, and Brazil which all delivered revenue growth that topped 40 percent”, which is much faster than growth in developed countries. These markets are also friendly towards Linux and pose significant challenges for Microsoft. This post is my take on the reasons for Brazil’s fondness of Linux. I speak for Brazil since I was born and raised there, but I think much of this applies to the other BRIC countries and emerging markets in general.

The following letter was sent by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang regarding Ballmer's decision to drop his company's bid to acquire Yahoo.

What strategy is needed to really spread desktop Linux to average home users? Here are some ideas that just might work.

The openSUSE team is proud to announce the second Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! New changes include countless bug fixes, as well as the import of the new openSUSE 11.0 artwork for login, splash screens and more. The live installation should work, but there are several known quirks, so be sure to check the most annoying bugs list before proceeding.

Last weekend we exhibited at LinuxFest NorthWest. It was pretty exciting, since this was the first time we’d actually had a booth and marketing schwag at an event. Hopefully it won’t be the last.

Software RAID is RAID implemented with software - no additional hardware such as a RAID controller is needed. Thus, software RAID is a good starting point to start getting some hands-on RAID experience. Also, software RAID is independent of proprietary management software - maintaining a software RAID works the same way on all machines that run Linux. However, there is something to think about too: when considering software RAID, think about performance.

The news from Sun Microsystems' quarterly financial report was not reassuring. After talking about restructuring the company for more than a year to better compete in the marketplace, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced a $34 million net loss or 4 cents per share in the fiscal third quarter, compared with a net income of $67 million or 7 cents per share profit in 2007.

There are some in this world who believe that Linux is the king of all operating systems. In some ways I agree with them because Linux certainly is a big player in the server world. It may lack in market share in the the desktop sector, but that doesn't mean it's a lesser operating system. The GPL has been instrumental in this as Linux has grown, starting with a simple, barely functional kernel, and slowly, patiently evolving into the giant it is today.

Mozilla Messaging, a subsidiary of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, yesterday patched five bugs in its Thunderbird e-mail client to fix flaws that were disclosed more than a month ago. Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 patches vulnerabilities in the Firefox engine, which the open-source e-mailer uses to render HTML. The same holes were closed in late March for the Mozilla Web browser.

It is not long now until the first Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference, to be held in Oakland, California from 13-15 May 2008. This upcoming event got me thinking about the role of open source in grid and cluster computing, in the past, present, and future.

The other day, Vincent Untz requested a git repo to house all freedesktop.org specs. I liked the idea a lot. Coincidentally, I was simultaneously involved in a conversation via private email with a few other freedesktop.org people about the processes around creating specifications (or lack thereof), so I took this as a cue to step back and really think about it a bit. freedesktop.org is one of the key points where the the free software world comes together to document the things we share so that integration and consistency (from the user's POV) can be achieved, so keeping it healthy is really important.

Stephen King once observed that the first review of his books was important because later ones often borrowed its opinions. Who did the first review of Ubuntu 8.04 – better known as Hardy Heron – is debatable, but something of the same consensus seems to have hit tech journalists, with the majority proclaiming that the release shows that GNU/Linux has finally producer a challenger to Windows.

This month's Harvard Business Review features a case study of a company debating whether to open source its software. Here's a mini review of the article.

Kerala is all set to become the first state in the country to completely banish Microsoft and allow only GNU/Linux free software to be used in the mandatory IT test at the state SSLC examinations that half a million students took in March. Till last year, they could take the exam using either free software or the Microsoft platform. Not anymore

For years, device and peripheral builders could get away with ignoring the Linux desktop market. It was too small to matter, they would say. Things have changed. At the Linux Foundation meeting in Austin, Texas, last month, major PC vendors ASUS, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo said they would be telling their chipset, component, and peripheral OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) that they were going to demand Linux-compatible hardware from them. It's one thing when Linux users ask for support; it's an entirely different thing when multi-billion-dollar companies demand it. This is an offer that the OEMs can't refuse.

Git is a program for Source Code Management (SCM) whose complexity has been blown out of proportion. This may be due to the fact that early on it was primarily used by Linux kernel hackers who, needless to say, do not represent most users of SCM tools. Regardless of its past, today the UI is quite simple and there are only a handful of techniques a user needs to manage their code base with git–in ways that are nearly impossible to do with the mainstream alternatives. These techniques, which are mentioned in the order of their suggested usage, focus on improving the overall quality of the code base throughout the life of a project.

F-Spot is a graphical photo manager that allows you to tag your image files and search and view images based on those tags. With phpfspot, you can share the photo collection you manage with F-Spot with others through a Web interface and let them navigate through your photos using the tags you have set up. No packages exist for phpfspot for Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE. I built it from source using version 1.4 and installed phpfspot on the desktop machine that I have F-Spot installed on. If you're running Debian Etch you might like to see this HOWTO for installation. phpfspot requires PHP 5 with GD and SQLite3 extensions, as well as the Calendar and HTML_AJAX PEAR extensions and the Smarty template engine.

The One Laptop Per Child Project appointed a new president and chief operating officer on Friday to run daily operations at the nonprofit effort, sending a signal that it could be recovering from the loss of top personnel over the past few months. Charles Kane will move from the part-time role as chief financial officer to oversee the organization's operational matters and distribution of the XO laptop on a day-to-day basis. Kane will provide OLPC the leadership needed to deliver on its commitments to partners and governments, said Nicholas Negroponte in a statement.

Microsoft and Yahoo! have pulled their chairs back up to the proverbial negotiating table. Citing an unnamed source, The New York Times insists the two giants are now in "active merger talks." Apparently, Microsoft made that outrageous Yahoo! bid even more outrageous, raising its valuation of Jerry Yang and crew "by several dollars" a share. So, Microsoft is saying that Yahoo! is worth somewhere between $46bn and $52bn. Yesterday, word was that Ballmer and the Ballmerettes were mulling a raise to $33 a share, before some large Yahoo! shareholders insisted on $35 to $37.

If you pick apart the recent set of Microsoft results (Q1/08) you discover that sales of Microsoft Windows fell by 24% (from $5.3 billion to $4 billion). When the PC market worldwide is growing at 12%, a collapse of 24% sounds disastrous, but those figures provide a distorted view. The $5.3 billion figure from a year ago included $1.2 billion of presales prior to Vista’s release, which actually took place in the previous quarter. So it is more accurate to view it as a revenue decline from $4.1 billion to $4 billion (2.4%) in a market that’s growing at around 12%.