Showing headlines posted by Abe

Before you start flaming, please understand that both I and the author of the news article are open source PROponents. We like open source. I've made a career of it.

But that doesn't mean open source is somehow infallible. Sometimes the comments here read like a devout Catholic thinking I've started a smear campaign against the immaculate conception. Keep in mind that it's just software and that it can always get better. Things get better as we find their bugs and improve them.

So, with that caveat....

An ill wind is blowing near Microsoft right now. It's come and passed before, but this time seems different. I'm starting to get a lot of clients asking about this "Linux stuff." And I'm not even talking about the corporations trying to save money on software; I'm talking about individuals trying to save their home computers.

To begin with, I'm not alone in having my doubts about the "upcoming patch" that Microsoft has promised on the tenth of January. It's simply not going to be all it needs to be (even if it does appear on time).

In an interview published by French Magazine Linux Pratique (issue #33), Général Brachet, in charge of IT for Gendarmerie Nationale explains why the French Military Police force (more than 100,000 personnel) has chosen to deploy Firefox and Thunderbird to respectively 70,000 and 45,000 seats. Here are a few excerpts:

The saga of Internet Explorer, the piece of software that once brought the Department of Justice to the brink of breaking up Microsoft, continues to eat away at the company. Several Microsoft employees have been reporting on their blogs that they feel the browser is not receiving adequate attention from upper management, and that it reflects badly on Microsoft as a result.

Rory Blythe, after posting a rant complaining about how many people seem excited about switching Firefox simply to "beat the man," admitted in a comment that the lack of new features in Internet Explorer was embarrassing:

The start of something bigger?

It's official; Zack Rusin, a lead developer of KDE, has stated in his journal that the upcoming KDE 4 will be able to run and display Dashboard widgets much in the same way that Mac OS X 10.4 can. He writes:

A new Trojan horse program was infecting PCs on Wednesday, exploiting a hole in Windows systems to sneak onto computers, then dropping adware or spyware or turning them into zombies, according to several Internet security companies.

The Trojan, dubbed Exploit-WMF (Windows Meta File), was rated a category 2 level risk, meaning it had the potential to continue to spread, said Dave Cole, director of security response at Symantec.

A lot of people ask about the real savings that Open Source can bring to school districts. Noxon Schools has used Open Source software for 6 years now and so I wanted to demonstrate the actual savings and philosophy of Open Source in a real life setting.

Noxon Schools is a rural school district in remote northwest Montana with a student body of about 270 students. The school uses 4 Linux Terminal Servers on separate networks to serve 125 Linux Thin Clients. In addition, the school has a Web server, DNS server, 2 Proxy Servers, Backup Server and a Samba server to provide all of the services the school needs in house. 60 computers run Windows 2000 or XP.

[Ed.] Don't you just love it when schools adopt FOSS and save some money? I certainly DO.

Distance learning and changing majors are both easy tasks for students at City University of New York, thanks to two Web-based software applications. Keeping the Linux servers that powered those applications running wasn't easy, however, due to constant server failures and the need for hands-on fixes.

The need for manual repairs for frequent Linux server crashes "translated into wasted time and money and, in some cases, downtime for important applications," said Arty Ecock, manager of VM enterprise systems for CUNY Computing and Information Systems (CIS).

[Ed.] Very misleading article. Writer attempts to create a perception by associating Linux with problems totally caused by disk drive hardware failures. What the heck?

As much I would like to believe I am as brilliant and charismatic as Linus Torvalds, it's really not worth the effort, because it's so not true. But Linus and I do agree on one thing: KDE is an excellent desktop. It looks good and it works well- what more does anyone need? Best of all, it doesn't simplify by removing functionality, like a certain well-known desktop project does. You want a simpler, cleaner interface? Might I suggest organizing the menus and configuration dialogs with common functions on top, and advanced functions available on a different level? Throwing away functionality seems a tad daft.

Diggable

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Visto Corp., a maker of mobile e-mail technology, has sued Microsoft Corp. for allegedly infringing on three of its patents related to how information is handled between servers and handheld devices such as cellular phones.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages and a permanent injunction to stop the infringement, was filed late Wednesday — the same day Visto announced that NTP Inc. had acquired an equity stake in the company and signed a patent licensing deal.

As the end of the year approaches, it appears that virtualization's time in the open source spotlight has all but come.

Whether it is because of the machinations of companies like Palo Alto, Calif.-based XenSource Inc. or analyst endorsement, emulating an enterprise-class infrastructure environment using open source has been on the rise in 2005. And, now, it looks ready to burst next year.

Two years ago, Joe Drouin, global CIO for automotive safety maker TRW, had a decision to make: whether to buy new hardware and continue running one of the auto parts supplier's major ERP systems from QAD on a proprietary Unix environment or standardize his system on a Dell cluster running Linux.

Here, thanks to jtiner, is the transcript of Microsoft's Alan Yates' remarks at yesterday's meeting regarding ODF/MS XML in Massachusetts. The audio from Dan Bricklin is here, if you wish to follow along. Yates also spoke in the Q & A session, if anyone is in a position to transcribe that part too.

I notice three salient things, from my point of view. You may notice other points, particularly if you are technical experts, but here's how it struck me.

But rivals skeptical of software vows.

A Microsoft Corp. executive said yesterday that his company's new office software will comply with a disputed Massachusetts government mandate requiring the use of ''open" data formats. Executives from rival software makers greeted the pledge with skepticism. But Massachusetts' chief information officer, Peter Quinn, who's leading the drive for the new data standard, said the Microsoft proposal will probably meet the state's demands.

[Ed. Misleading Title, Nothing new from MS. Same Old Same Old.]

Lately, I have been hearing that Ubuntu is an easy Linux distribution to install and it is easier to install than Windows XP. I have even heard remarks that "My grandmother could install Ubuntu." With that being said, I did virtual installs of both Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 to see which one I felt was easier. The XP interface was easier to work with but had many more screens to work through than the Ubuntu Linux.