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Microsoft's Linux expert has launched a company sanctioned blog in an outreach attempt to the Open Source community but all it seems to attract are irate anti-Microsoft posters.

Well, it's difficut to resist the temptation to hit such a vulnerable target. I think that, before I let my server touch their port 25, they need to kill that infestion of viruses and worms that causes their anti-competitive behavior. And ridding themselves of the bug(s) that spews forth all those lies about GNU/Linux and FOSS licenses wouldn't hurt, either. Then, and maybe then, I'll connect to their port 25. - dcparris

James Courtier queried the Linux Kernel mailing list on the feasibility of restoring the kernel ring buffer after a reset. He proposed simply writing the ring buffer data redundantly to memory in the hope that not all RAM is erased at boot time, allowing the buffer to be reconstructed. The kernel ring buffer is typically viewed with the dmesg command. Referring to the method of collecting data from an oops through a serial connection, James explained, "the main advantage of something like this would be for newer motherboards that are around now that don't have a serial port." An existing solution to this problem is usingkexec to boot a special lightweight kernel after a crash to collect a kernel crash dump.

The general consensus to James' query was that data written to RAM before a reset will not be available after, though exactly how much of the RAM is overwritten was debated. Kexec author Eric Biederman explained, "clearing the memory can be done at full memory bandwidth which can happen in seconds. On systems with ECC you need initialize all of the check bits so some kind of write to memory needs to happen." He then went on to note, "in practice a reset does not clear the memory and only a few bits tend to get flipped." Andi Kleen offered an alternative solution, "define a generic interface that allows drivers to register memory storage handlers. Add a entry into the oops die and panic notifiers that saves the kernel log into these backends." As an example, Andi suggested that video drivers could make available a small portion of video card RAM which could be used to preserve crash data across reboots.

In a famous example of how first movers can lose their advantage, second-mover Microsoft won the Web browser wars from Netscape and continues to dominate the market today. But that competition was the subject of another "war," this one among researchers who study how technology is diffused into the market.

Novell president and chief operating officer, Ron Hovsepian believes the company’s new Linux desktop, based on Suse Linux 10.0, has made Novell an enterprise player while its competitor Red Hat has been marginalised for ignoring the space.

Is Hovsepian taking a misinformation note from Ballmer? I thought Fedora Core was the testing version of Red Hat. I could be wrong; I'm human after all.

SourceForge.net's community has spoken: its favourite open source application is the Azureus Bittorrent client. The results of the 2006 SourceForge.net's Community Choice Awards, announced late last week, saw two South African open source projects nominated, but not placing in the top three.

Toulouse, Oberhaching – The Letux project is happy to announce the first release of its commercial distribution of free software, aimed at off-the-shelf handheld devices.

In this TestRun podcast, eWEEK Labs' Jim Rapoza and Jason Brooks discuss the possible effects of the acquisition. (Podcast #67)

"All About the Apps" puts the spotlight on the classics of KDE's applications as well as new and promising applications from the KDE community that can make your KDE desktop more productive. We will also keep you informed about development in current KDE 3.5 series.

Until furter notice, don't trust the Address Bar in IE, it lies like a rug. Plus: Critical patches coming Tuesday from Microsoft.

O.k., I think it's time for a different perspective on Internet Explorer. I suggest Microsoft ditch Internet Explorer and ship Windows Vista with Firefox. That may be a bitter pill for them to swallow, but at least their users will be safer - or at least as safe as you can be on a system that relies too heavily on remote procedure calls. - dcparris

Mailman with Postfix Configuration

Nokia is "product" company, product manager Ari Jaaski told listeners at LinuxWorld last week; it never publicly released the source code to anything before. Yet in conjunction with the launch of its 770 Internet tablet, Nokia has started an open source application platform, dedicated programmers to existing open source projects, sponsored developers already working on open source, and expended resources to promote open source software.

Some organizations, in spite of their best efforts, are not able to attract high-caliber IT personnel. In the increasingly competitive world of business, IT plays a critical role in the success of the enterprise. Failing to attract highly skilled IT employees takes a competitive toll over time.

It’s supposed to protect you from predators spying on your computer habits, but a bill Microsoft Corp. helped write for Oklahoma will open your personal information to warrantless searches, according to a computer privacy expert and a state representative.

Is this the same Oklahoma that sits just North of Texas in the United States, or some other Oklahoma in a parallel universe? Oklahomans need to burn up the telephone wires to some legislators! - dcparris

Red Hat India announced that Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) has chosen to implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its desktops and servers. LIC will migrate all its mission critical business applications to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, across all its locations in India and abroad.

Sunday, April 09, 2006: iWave Systems, an embedded systems design company from Bangalore, has announced its new design, the iW-RainboW-Giga, at the ICT Pavilion, HongKong Electronics Fair 2006.

Bill Hilf, Microsoft's director of platform technology strategy, is charging ahead by looking for ways his company can work with open source that he says are beneficial to all. At LinuxWorld Conference & Expo - Boston 2006 last week, Hilf said Microsoft is launching a Web site solely for the purpose of communicating Microsoft's own open source activities.

Bill Hilf spoke with SearchWinIT.com's news director Margie Semilof about Microsoft's activities in community development.

Microsoft said last week it would remove the price tag from its Virtual Server and begin offering the virtualization technology as a free download to Windows users.

Entrepreneur has a software suite to help companies build their own service-oriented architectures

Red Hat, Inc., a vendor of open source products to the enterprise, has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire JBoss, a vendor of open source middleware.