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At the ministerial level, China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has outlined plans to boost support for the development of China's semiconductor industry and allocate additional funding for development of the Linux operating system and applications.

I worry I'm rapidly becoming a curmudgeon. It's a little scary because I'm a software developer and the co-owner of a small Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and I make my living by making users happy.

[ED: Even easily used Macs can be confusing, the author is asking some fundamental questions. - HC]

Just what makes a Mono developer tick? Linux format has a brief interview with Edd Dumbill and Niel Bornstein, two prominent Mono coders who've just written a book on the open source .NET implementation. They explain the advantages of C# over other languages, and give a bit of advice for budding Mono app developers.

[ED: The short, abstracted portion comes from a U.K. Linux publication*. While Mono is tolerated, I suspect as soon as it no longer fits any MS need, the attempt to cut it off at its knees will ensue. At a recent MS event, an unofficial 'Birds of a Feather' type meeting was not allowed on the convention site. If this is the way they are treated as "friends, what happens when is sours? - HC]

[ED: * they want you to buy the magazine to read the entire interview. Now it's kind of expensive in the States, but taped to the front is either a DVD or a couple of CDs with content. - HC]

Last year, the IT departments of municipalities in Massachusetts became part of a war of disinformation, and later a political football, in the battle over ODF. Now, they'll have a chance to hear the whole story, and make up their own minds what is best for them, and for their constituencies.

One of the more bizarre, but less noticed threads in the OpenDocument Format (ODF) story in Massachusetts involves whether or not the many hundreds of municipalities in Massachusetts would be required to use software that supported ODF, or at least be able to work with documents created using such software when they interacted with State government. Later this month, the CIOs of Massachusetts municipalities will have a chance to get the straight story when Peter Quinn's successor Louis Gutierrez, who is implementing ODF, and State Supervisor of Public Records Alan Cote, who is critical of ODF, appear on the same stage to give their views at a meeting of the Massachusetts Government Information Systems Association.

Hilf says: "When I talk to a middle of the road customer that might be indifferent about Microsoft or Linux, one of the words they typically use with me is predictability. How do I know that the software is extraordinarily well tested and predictable? Some of the key differentiators are when I think about how we build software, a tremendous amount of investment and energy goes into testing to ensure the predictability of the software experience."[Ed: Their software is predictable all right, no backwards compatability and you know it will crash. - sharkscott]

Lousiana State University adds an SGI Visualization System to its 1,024-processor Linux cluster which was installed August, 2005.

With the 2006 Hurricane Season less than three months away and already expected to be about as active as 2005, the Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system is expected to improve the way data is provided to EOCs.

"Our Katrina efforts provide both a compelling stereo fly-through, as well as a collaboratively-manipulable, fully interactive visualization of Katrina," said Brygg Ullmer, assistant professor, LSU CS + CCT, and leader of VIDA's visualization group. "Several of these datasets are large-scale simulations, seeded by actual measurements of the storm; others include data from sensors and satellites. We've transformed these into two compelling kinds of visuals. One of these is a visual flythrough, viewable in stereo with inexpensive glasses. The second is a fully interactive visualization, which allows multiple participants to collaboratively steer time and other parameters through new 'tangible' interaction devices. We're now trying to leverage that interactivity, hosting it on the Prism system so that people all over campus -- or throughout the state -- can inspect, manipulate, and dissect the anatomy and physiology of Katrina. [...]"

Did you know that you can load in your browser an old map showing the operations of General Washington in 1776-77, or the 1927 handmade sketch of the first negative feedback amplifier? These Web pages are in a highly compressed image format called DjVu that's highly suitable for archival material. Here's how you can start enjoying DjVu.

I are very pleased to announce the availability of Foresight Desktop Linux 0.9.4 with GNOME 2.14. This release includes a number of updates:

Until I get round to sorting this forum out, i'm going to have to close it due to a change of heart at the LPI and several users of the forum who do not understand what should and shouldn't be posted. -dan@lpiforums.com - 15/March/2006

Boston Globe Ombudsman Richard Chacon has pledged to "examine issues of ethics and how this newspaper measures up to readers' expectations," and says he needs the help of vigilent readers. Uh, isn't the ball in his court?

I'm not a Boston Globe subscriber (I'm a Times man, myself), so it was an alert Standards Blog reader Patrick McCormick who e-mailed me to let me know that Globe ombudsman Richard Chacon had written something that I'd find interesting, and he was right. Regular readers will recall that Mr. Chacon had promised way back on December 12 of last year to look into the circumstances surrounding the writing of a Globe article that contributed to the resignation of Massachusetts State CIO Peter Quinn. No, this article is not the long anticipated report on that subject. Instead, it’s a piece titled The Ethics Project that appeared in yesterday's Sunday edition.

"We looked at best-of-breed open source solutions like Smoothwall, Freeradius, and OpenSSL; we have our own kernel based on Red Hat Linux and did a lot of development."

[Ed. Impressive numbers: 540,000 students, 42,000 teachers, 1700 sites. --grouch]

Educators and developers will gather at the West Africa Developer Roadshow in Ghana later this year to collaborate on "Education-out-of-the-box", a software collection that is aimed at helping people use FOSS in the educational arena.

Eben Moglen, the legal counsel of the FSF, claims that free software is 'an immense pile of golden eggs' — and companies need to take care of the geese that lay them. Free software lawyer Eben Moglen has denied that free software is incompatible with capitalism, a claim that has been made by various companies, including Microsoft and SCO.

Evolution-Data Optimized (EVDO) is a wireless broadband service that offers throughput of up to a theoretical maximum of 2.4Mbps. Verizon's service, which provides the best EVDO coverage in the US can work with Linux with a little bit of tweaking.

Heat, dust, humidity and irregular power supplies take their toll on computers in Africa. A group from Nigeria working together with a UK firm, however, are hoping their solar-powered, solid-state PC will make computers more accessible and reliable for users in the developing world.

The Linux vendor has sweeping plans to simplify virtualization deployment for its customers on its RHEL platform.

'I live in a world where software had freed me,' says Eben Moglen, explaining his commitment to software freedom

The days are over when Microsoft could rely on being the only software platform in town. When Quocirca sifted through 8000 IT professionals’ responses to an online questionnaire last year, the UK consultancy discovered deep unease with Microsoft’s Windows operating system. In some respondents Microsoft inspired a near-psychotic depth of loathing.

The Fedora distribution is one of the most widely used GNU/Linux distributions. Although non-users sometimes dismiss it as too mainstream to be of interest, those familiar with it appreciate that it uses only free software and showcases the latest programs. Fedora Core 5 (FC5) is slated for release next week. .

Update: The government agency has been accused of excluding open source software from its educational software databases, despite highlighting the money that could be saved