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Mr. Titch, in his article The Dangers of Dictating Procurement, shows that he has spent too much time listening to Microsoft propaganda and not enough time thinking for himself - a sad position for a think tank representative. Now Mr. Titch says he has received "no real reply". Mr. Titch, here is my reply.

The problem with writing and editing on a computer, versus having words on paper, is that it's usually hard to compare text from different sections of a document when they don't fit on the screen together. One way to do it is to use Vim's viewports feature. Another is to "fold" the text. Using Vim's folding features, you can tuck away portions of a file's text so that they're out of sight until you want to work with them again. Here's how.

From the Legal-Eagle dept.:
Here's an important development. The Open Invention Network has bought some new patents, with the express purpose of protecting Linux.

Users can get a preview of the next Mandriva server distribution, which promises to be a more secure and versatile enterprise-level platform than previous releases.

A little-known African localisation project called KiLinux scooped a Stockholm Challenge Award in Sweden earlier this month, while South Africa's Translate.org.za walked away with nothing. Tectonic asks Translate.org.za director Dwayne Bailey why he's still smiling. (Well, at least a little.)

DesktopLinux.com columnist and well-known Linux test pilot Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that he's run up against a major flaw in his current favorite desktop Linux, OpenSUSE 10.1. Apparently, the project's effort to enhance the distro's package manager of the distribution has gone awry.

Desktop sales played a big role in Hewlett-Packard's recent news-making profit gains. In the future, Linux will figure prominently in HP desktops, says Christine Martino, vice president of HP's Open Source and Linux Organization. She's not predicting an overthrow of Windows desktops anytime soon, though.

An about turn in BI

Comment Given that we have had decision support systems, enterprise information systems, and now business intelligence for the better part of two decades, you would think that the market would be showing some signs of maturity or, at least, that it was consolidating and moving towards some sort of commoditisation. From the number of new BI companies that I have met lately, this seems very far from fruition.…

NVIDIA NVIDIA has just released a new driver, version 1.0-8762. This one looks to be pretty stable as it fixes some important bugs and adds new card support.

I set up ftps on our vserver, and from work, I tested it sucessfully with lftp and kasablanca on Sid.

  LXer Feature: 24-May-06

Steven Titch must be a glutton for embarrassment. First, he writes an article that confuses what few facts it contains. Then, in response to my two articles, one correcting the facts, and the other addressing the difference between fact and fiction, he complains on his blog that I failed to reply to his "central point - that it’s bad policy to mandate open source procurement." He apparently doesn't realize that was exactly the point of my two articles - his central point, which is a straw man, is built on fiction.

Who needs hosting when your own PC will do?

Dinotrac writes: "We see the repeated assertion of ODF = OpenOffice and Microsoft != ODF to support a misrepresentation so blatant that we are forced to abandon polite labels like advocacy, exaggeration, and puffery for the naked truth: he's lying."

According to proponents of this myth, Apple will, could, or should shortly replace Mac OS X's kernel with Linux. They're wrong; here's why.

Three years ago, celebrated security expert Dan Geer lost his job at @stake when he co-authored a paper on the dangers that the Microsoft "monoculture" represented for end-users. He knew what he was talking about.

In last week's suspenseful installment we learned how to generate a quick 'n' dirty preseed configuration file for replicating a Debian installation, and how to perform a minimal custom installation with a USB stick. Today we'll cover how to start a network installation with either a newfangled USB stick or an oldfangled CD-ROM, or an even more antique 3.5" diskette.

The Holy Grail of online music sales is the ability to offer iPod-compatible tracks. Like the quest for the mythical cup itself, the search for iPod compatibility has been largely fruitless for Apple's competitors, whose DRM schemes are incompatible with the iconic music player.

[Check out Magnatune.com. I play in a band and if I sign with anyone, its going to be them.-Scott]

Despite its world-saving image, open source software has not made much real revolution. But Becky Hogge finds hope in new software "for human beings", designed to bridge the digital divide.

More than a quarter of the computer software used in the UK is pirated, according to a report.

An open source software company is something of a paradox. On the one hand, it has to convince customers that software is becoming increasingly commoditised, that proprietary software is limiting and expensive, and that standards-based, community-developed and community-supported open source software is the way to go. On the other hand, an open source company has to persuade those same customers that they should pay for the use of that same software.

[Am I the only one getting sick and tired of people promoting non-free software as a good thing? What good is freedom if I just turn around and lose it again? And what is the benefit of having lost my freedom? - dcparris]