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Microsoft has announced that it will buy DATAllegro, maker of data warehouse appliances. It plans to use the acquired technology as the basis for a SQL Server 2008 appliance. This purchase is interesting on a lot of levels for the enterprise market. First and foremost, it signals that the hot area of high-end, shared nothing massively parallel processing (MPP) appliances have won out and users can expect them to take a major leap toward affordability, now that Microsoft has entered the market.

The family of KDE websites has got a new member, the site for the fine utilities applications from the module kdeutils. Despite being one of the first modules, kdeutils has always been without its own website. No longer. At utils.kde.org you can now find a lot of information about the KDE Utilities. See for yourself the details of the current set of programs below.

In the nightmare scenario of Luddites everywhere, The Computers have been entrusted with mankind's accumulated knowledge. All is well until that fateful day when the machines band together, creating a mammoth, all-powerful, living network that thinks, grows and takes over the Earth. Think"The Terminator" or"Colossus: The Forbin Project."

Ever since a gaunt Steve Jobs addressed the adoring crowds at this year's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, the press, Apple fans - and most especially, Apple investors - have been concerned over the state of his health. Today comes the good news that Steve is just fine, thank you. The bad news is how the news was reported.

On July 15, Red Hat and Firestar released the terms of the settlement [PDF] of their patent suit. When we last looked at this settlement, those terms were not available. Now we can examine exactly what was agreed to and assess the degree of protection that Red Hat actually negotiated for the wider community. It may be tempting to say that recent events have reduced the relevance of this settlement, but that would be a mistake; what Red Hat has done here still matters.

Fortunately we rabble measure by a different yardstick, and can see the real value of this post. Which is some random computer user somewhere on the planet had the expertise to dissect and analyze a BIOS flaw, and then had the best bully pulpit of all time, the Internet, to share his findings. Despite the rise of this brave new police state era, we don't need to know anything about theAlmightyCthulhu. We don't need his home address, or work history, or DNA and fingerprints. We don't need to know who his family is and a record of everything they'v ever done. All we need to know is in that forum post- if the information is true and correct, it stands on its own. He even gives instructions for reproducing his work.

"Since everybody seems to be having fun building new filesystems these days, I thought I should join the party, began Daniel Phillips, announcing the Tux3 versioning filesystem. He continued, "Tux3 is a write anywhere, atomic commit, btree based versioning filesystem. As part of this work, the venerable HTree design used in Ext3 and Lustre is getting a rev to better support NFS and possibly become more efficient."

Mostly Linux and Unix humor with some unavoidable MS-bashing :)

Since version 2 came out in 2005, Google Desktop for Windows has included a sidebar that users can fill with screen gadgets, but the Linux version (version 1, from June 2007) provided only indexing and search functions, with no eye candy whatsoever. This has finally changed. Google recently released Google Gadgets for Linux (GGL), which closes the gap between the operating systems. With GGL, you can run as many gadgets as you wish on your screen -- or at least that's the idea. Some flaws still need to be fixed, and not everything works 100% correctly.

So you've been the IBM AIX guru on your team for years now and your bosses have determined that they want to try Linux on System p. The purpose of this article is to introduce Linux to AIX administrators. It will show you what you need to know to make the transition to Linux simpler.

Intel has switched from Ubuntu to Fedora Linux for release 2.0 of its MID-targeted Moblin open source stack, according to a variety of sources, including The Register. Intel also indicated Moblin 2.0 would be unveiled on August 19th, say multiple sources.

Here's how it works: Novell owns Unix's IP (intellectual property). SCO sold Unix's IP to Sun. Sun then included some Unix IP into Solaris. Finally, Sun open sourced Solaris as OpenSolaris. Sounds like trouble, doesn't it? While Sun's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps described the line of logic above as "sheer speculation," others see a major potential legal problem for Sun. However, analysts, lawyers and open source leaders also agreed that it's unlikely Novell would ever choose to make trouble for Sun. Novell, however, has not commented on its intentions despite several attempts to get the Linux company's take on the issue.

I disassembled my BIOS to have a look around, and while I won't post the results here,I'll tell you what I did find. They have several different tables, a group for Windws XP and Vista, a group for 2000, a group for NT, Me, 95, 98, etc. that just errors out, and one for LINUX.

Steve Ballmer has recently sent a memo to every Microsoft employee. Ballmer’s memo leaked really quickly (I wonder if he expected it). After swallowing the corporate-madness part (but that’s allowed: he’s a “mad” corporate leader after all), one particular passage really grabbed my attention. Taking about Internet applications being popular, he wrote: “But we also need to make sure developers have the .NET skills to write unique Windows applications using Windows Presentation Foundation”. Which begs the question: does anybody still develop Microsoft Windows applications? Really?

Over the past few days details have surfaced about the nature of the DNS bug that Dan Kaminsky announced two weeks ago. Yes, it is as big and as scary as we were told. As you may remember, Kaminsky coordinated the announcement with many major software vendors and promised not to disclose a way to exploit the bug until August 6 at the annual Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. This would give ISPs 30 days to patch their systems and protect their users. Kaminsky also asked members of the security community to refrain from publicly speculating about the issue until the details were officially announced. That may have been too much to ask, as it only took 13 days for the issue to find its way into the public eye.

VIA Technologies today boosted its involvement in the open source community by appointing Harald Welte as its open source liason. Welte was the 2007 recipient of the Free Software Foundation’s Award for the Advancement of Free Software. He also recently won the Defender of Rights award at the 2008 Open Source Awards.

The second of four days at the 10th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium got off to an unusual start as a small bird "assisted" Rob Landley in giving the first talk I attended, called "Where Linux kernel documentation hides." The tweeting bird was polite, only flying over the audience a couple of times and mostly paying attention. Landley did a six-month fellowship with the Linux Foundation last year to try to improve the Linux kernel's documentation. He explained that it was meant to be a year, but after six months he had come to some conclusions about how documentation should be done, which he said the Linux Foundation both agreed with and did not plan to pursue, and so he went back to maintaining his other projects.

"The following paper I wrote a few months ago because I got sick and tired of seeing people switching to GNU/Linux only to continue to run their Windows programs without even bothering to look for alternatives. Of course, they all used either WINE or Cedega to achieve this. Since I am active in testing WINE for a few select Windows-only applications, my views on what WINE should be used for differs greatly from others."

If you like free software, Blender, cartoons and animations then Terry Hancock at Freesoftware Magazine has the lowdown on the latest offering: Big Buck Bunny, a product of Blender's Peach Open Movie Project. You can read the background and details of the movie and the project at Freesoftware Magazine

When most people install a free software mail transport agent (MTA) they plumb for Postfix, Exim, qmail or Sendmail. Whilst these are all fine, they can be a little over the top for some smaller systems or systems where all you need is some kind of local MTA functionality. In these cases many people will install their favourite MTA anyway — but there are more lightweight alternatives. Here I look at one of them: Smail. Before I go any further I should clarify — for those who don’t already know — that Smail is not a mail client. It won’t do what Thunderbird, Evolution, Kmail and Mutt do. It delivers email for those programs. It also does not provide POP3 or IMAP services. Like most MTAs it performs a single core task; it routes email from one place to another.