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At first glance, you might think the headline to this blog entry is an oxymoron. In reality, Microsoft certainly does have an open source chief (Sam Ramji). And in some cases, Microsoft is downright happy to support open source. Skeptical? Allow The VAR Guy to explain.

Discover a tool that simplifies the creation and deployment of MapReduce applications. The Eclipse plug-in uses the Hadoop open-source MapReduce framework, which enables data-intensive applications to run on large clusters of commodity hardware.

Microsoft’s Windows juggernaut is collapsing as it tries to support 20 years of applications and becomes more complicated by the minute. Meanwhile, Windows has outgrown hardware and customers are pondering skipping Vista to wait for Windows 7. If Windows is going to remain relevant it will need radical changes. That sobering outlook comes courtesy of Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald. Half of a full room of IT managers and executives raised their hands when asked whether Microsoft needed to radically change its approach to Windows. “Windows is too monolithic,” says Silver.

Here is a short screenshot tour of the latest from Mandriva Linux. Just released Mandriva One 2008.1 Spring GNOME and KDE Editions. Today we will show only the GNOME release and do not forget to checkout our short flash video.

The market for cheap sub-notebooks is simply exploding. It all started with the OLPC XO, then Intel jumped in with the Classmate. Soon Asus revealed its critically acclaimed Eee PC, and these low-priced, low-powered (often Linux-running) machines truly started to take the world by storm. The latest entry into this field is the Hewlett Packard 2133 Mini-Note PC. The Mini-Note starts at $499, for the entry level model with 512 megabytes of RAM, 4-gigabytes of storage, a 1-gigahertz VIA processor, and Linux.

[Other reports say that the HP laptop will run SUSE -- sr]

HP has entered the mini-laptop arena with a device targeting education and cost-conscious consumers. The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC weighs 2.8 pounds with a nine-inch display and a nearly full-sized keyboard, and runs runs Linux, Windows Vista, or Windows XP on a Via C7-M ULV processor.

In this age of multi-core processors and 3-D desktops, some people still get work done on old resource-strapped single-core machines, thanks to programs like the AbiWord word processor. The latest stable AbiWord 2.6.0 release was unveiled last month, two years after the software's last stable release. Feature-wise, the little cross-platform word processor has closed the gap with heavyweight OpenOffice.org Writer, but it suffers from the oldest Linux ill of all -- it's a pain to install.

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, currently in progress in Austin, Texas, is a small event, with only about 300 invited attendees. Because it is small, you can find yourself face-to-face or in conversation with some of the biggest names in and around the Linux kernel, business, and open source scenes, including Ted Ts'o, Jon "maddog" Hall, Bruce Perens, Dan Frye, and Larry Augustin. The venue for the event -- the J.J. Pickle Research Center Campus at the University of Texas -- is the same place where IBM held its first "secret" Linux summit in 1999 to announce and refine its Linux strategy internally.

South Africa’s minister of public service and administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, took centre stage at a protest march in Norway today. The march was held to protest alleged irregularities in the ratification of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) document format as an ISO standard last week. Sections of a speech, given by the minister ahead of the ISO vote last week, were read out to the gathered crowd by Steve Pepper, former chairman of the Norwegian committe responsible for that country’s OOXML vote.

Brian Jones of Microsoft feels that the storm of publicity about shortcomings in OOXML is largely due to IBM investing its money and time in developing the expertise to consult for ODF-using products.He says that he really stands for choice. In fact, he wants the end-user and the developer to be able to choose freely whether to support ODF or OOXML or perhaps even both. Mr. Jones, if you really care about choice, implement ODF as a fully-native peer to OOXML and automatically download it in the next batch of updates, rather than using a partially-functional plug-in that has to be searched out and then downloaded. Or is it really Microsoft that is afraid?

At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Supercomputing Center April 8, Hewlett-Packard announced the release of its first Linux-powered computer to be sold in the United States, the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1.

The demonstration was completed about an hour ago - more about that later (with pictures). Here is the speech by Steve Pepper held during the demonstration - and it is a very good summary of the whole OOXML case.

Now Ontario Linux Fest can be called an annual event! Confirmed our date and venue for 2008.

The Asus Eee PC ultraportable comes bundled with a version of Xandros as its operating system. If you would like to try a different Linux distro on your Eee, there are plenty of options to choose from, including eeeXubuntu, EeeDora, ZenEee, EeePCLinuxOS, and Puppeee. The latter is based on Puppy Linux, a tiny Linux distribution that sports a few unique features that make it a perfect candidate for use on machines like the Eee PC.

Komparator is an application, that can compare and synchronize the content of two (local or remote) folders. Contrary to popular belief this activity is popular among users of all platforms, but in Linux you had to use unfriendly console apps (such as diff) to do the job. Not anymore!

Storage performance has failed to keep up with that of other major components of computer systems. Hard disks have gotten larger, but their speed has not kept pace with the relative speed improvements in RAM and CPU technology. The potential for your hard drive to be your system's performance bottleneck makes knowing how fast your disks and filesystems are and getting quantitative measurements on any improvements you can make to the disk subsystem important. One way to make disk access faster is to use more disks in combination, as in a RAID-5 configuration.

The NSW Department of Education has put Microsoft on notice after it agreed to extend its software licensing agreement with the company for just one year instead of renegotiating a new three-year contract. At the same time, technology chief Stephen Wilson announced the department will install a free alternative to Microsoft's Office suite, referred to in industry circles as OpenOffice, on 41,000 computers due to be distributed to schools across the state by the end of 2008. The NSW Department of Education is also resisting Microsoft's attempts to upgrade users to the latest version of its Vista operating system. Instead, Wilson's team is downgrading every new computer it buys from Vista to Windows XP.

Guest commentator Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Ziff Davis Enterprise tells what, in his opinion, is important about the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit going on right now in Austin, Texas.

Open Health Tools (OHT), based in the United States, announced its Health Interoperability Framework on Tuesday, which will see the organization work with international standards bodies, governments and companies from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the United States to develop common healthcare IT products and services.

Late last week I had the chance to participate in a call with Bob Bickel and Rich Friedman of Ringside Networks who talked us through their plans for the new open source social networking technology vendor. In short, Ringside’s Social Application Server is designed to add social networking capabilities to existing applications and content. It does this providing hooks into enterprise data sources while delivering compatibility and interoperability with Facebook applications via the Facebook API, while support for Google and MySpace’s OpenSocial is also on its way.