Showing all newswire headlines

Craigslist chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, aims to offer a public service, not add zeros to his bank balance

Craigslist only charges in three cities - asking for fees from companies placing recruitment adverts on its San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York sites. Is this business model sustainable? Buckmaster thinks so. Costs are kept low by using open source software such as Linux, which means there are no licensing costs to pay. The company doesn't want to employ many more staff.

You've probably heard the talk and seen the articles from Linux enthusiasts on how virtually any Linux distro can run rings around Windows. To help clarify things, Scott M. Morris, the editor of Novell's CoolSolutions website, has complied all the key reasons in one handy, bookmarkable article.

Yes PS3 is delayed, but did you know: "Kutaragi additionally confirmed that the gaming console will ship with an upgradable 60GB hard drive pre-installed with Linux ..."? Moreover, should the PS3 once again out sell the X-box, this will be a visible trashing of Windows by Linux.

[ED: Hey Bomber, shift your troops to defend the silly flank -(I wonder what that means, terrorists or extraneous chatter caught by your N.S.A. at work?) - HC]

Financially strapped Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) is targetting SAP customers planning to migrate off mainframe platforms with Linux-based servers.

[ED: Is there a more troubled vendor than SAP? Oh, it's a SAP site. Now I understand. - HC]

Telephone reps love the new systems that combine computers with telephones. ISPs are hard at work convincing customers to disconnect their Old World telephone lines in favor of sophisticated combinations of voice and data. Phone companies are pushing their phone experience as proof that they're equally capable at protecting your data. And above all, everybody has the perfect bundle for *you.* No matter which pitch you swallow, Email Battles shows you the one line in the sand that you must not cross.

[ED: The skinny: keep the land line for now. My VoIP many times has better sound quality, but it is not uncommon to see daily network failures. Last big one was over 12 hours. - HC]

The article in The Economist, Open, but not as usual, contains misrepresentations that appear to be designed to disparage open source and promote closed source.

[ED: Front page news, straight from my favorite Grouch - HC]

The company has for years marketed its products to the tech elite within big companies. Now Microsoft is making concerted effort to speak the language of top executives.

[All this time I thought they avoided the "tech elite" to get the CEO to buy the latest viral-ware for the trickle-down effect]

This very small piece from the Library Journal cites a story in Linux Journal. Start there, but be sure to click the link in the second paragraph that speaks about a Google add on for searching library collections, or for the impatient go there directly: by Brian Kenney also in the Library Journal.

Why the best model for building out infrastructure may be the Interstate Highway System.

[ED: I really like Doc, he thinks very differently than most keyboard pounders, however, this is a bad analogy for several reasons. Despite the unrequited American love of the automoble the freeways in what we humans view as hard reality must give way to paying more of the true costs. That is, think toll roads and limiting access - features that are neither necessary nor desireable for the internet. Time for many to really to think differently. - HC]

In a landmark decision a Dutch court has ruled in favour of a Creative Commons licence in a case involving pictures published by MTV personality Adam Curry. The pictures were reproduced by a Dutch newspaper without Curry's permission.

[ED: This is just one of the reasons I dislike the proliferation of supposed variations of Open Source and Free licenses for software: it is just too easy to make a good faith error that hurts too many. - HC]

Splunk, Inc. has received plenty accolades lately, mostly as a result of its effort in making Splunk, its flagship product, available with an open source API. Splunk seeks to parse every log file within your IT infrastructure, and then correlates the data in a meaningful way. After it consumes tons of data, Splunk's Web interface makes it very easy to grok the root cause of most issues without having to manually peruse tons of separate log files.

The GNOME desktop has come a long way since a study sponsored by Sun Microsystems in 2001 raised usability issues. Since then, GNOME has learned to take usability seriously, developing its Human Interface Guidelines and making strong efforts to apply them more thoroughly with each release. The GNOME 2.14 release continues this tradition. Although few major innovations are visible to the user, the release includes another round of improvements in usability and the continued development of the desktop administration tools, as well as numerous small improvements in productivity software.

This week, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu released security advisories. Among the affected packages were Cube, Freeciv, Bomberclone, kdegraphics, WebCalendar, FFmpeg, GnuPG, metamail, Curl, libextractor, Crossfire, Lurker, Zoo, and several other packages. Ubuntu released an important kernel upgrade that addresses several vulnerabilities. FreeBSD did not report any security updates this week.

My list of tools is aimed at non-professional system administrators who manage Linux machines in a home or small-office network. On my network, I use a number of security-related programs that I usually run as cron jobs. None of the programs are mentioned in the Top 75 Security Tools list, but I like them because they are easy to install and configure, and they work well. I also have a few recovery tools that I use when a system is having problems.

I wanted a quick and easy way to encrypt text for people that I didn't have public keys for. This allows for some security, and for easy decryption. For decrypting, my favorite method is to just copy the message to my clipboard and use KGpg to decrypt it. KGpg will ask you for the passphrase, and not require a public key to decrypt, just the correct passphrase will do.

The Pietermaritzburg Linux Enthusiasts Group makes one terminally ill teenager's dream of owning a laptop a reality.

Xandros recently released a version of its desktop Linux software aimed at the European market, tying in some of the advanced and emerging mobility services that are being developed and deployed in that region. If you support end-users who travel between Europe and the U.S., and want a Linux laptop, this could be the right system.

Exclusive We'll see you in hell or at least Santa Clara

IBM and Oracle representatives - backing Eclipse's BPEL designer project - are expected to square off with representatives from Iona, Sybase and ObjectWeb - who are pushing the rival Eclipse STP (SOA Tools Platform) Project - to propose a merging of the teams' initiatives ... is a need for a seperate open source business process execution language (BPEL) environment for SOAs ...

[ED: Important issues, perhaps dealth with too lightly, however, I am predisposed to listen to a Sybase argument given the superiority I have seen in its application syntax over either Oracle or IBM. - Hc]

Knoppix.org reports - The KNOPPIX 5.0 Live DVD contains some major changes in the unionfs-based file system, new hardware detection and autoconfiguration, and a more 'genuine Debian' oriented selection of packages.

OSDir had a look at the latest KNOPPIX offering in their KNOPPIX 5.0 Screenshot Tour. Sweet!

In essence, of the companies touting open source, IBM is one that has understood it, hence, it will profit from its corraboration efforts in the market. Eventually it will just become a reality instead of a buzz word as it is now employed by many.