Showing all newswire headlines

Yesterday I interviewed digg founder Kevin Rose to discuss digg's popularity, its battle with spammers, the recent issues with GroupThink and digg's upcoming personalization features. This is the first of a two-part article presenting that interview. NB: Part 2 available now.

I once visited Slashdot a lot but rarely these days. VA Software, once VALinux, bought them, so I expected to find a lot of GNU news. I think they have gone down hill. Also, the Slashdot effect has become a joke. We get higher visits from Digg.com.

Obviously, we're back in business. One of our editors suggested using Intellitext. Dave decided to give it a trial run for visitors who had not registered. If you were logged on to the site, you would not have seen the key words.

While Intellitext had promised to block Microsoft ads, they obviously did not. We had posts from readers saying they had seen embedded ads from Microsoft last week. I didn't see them until I logged out today.

Following is a excerpt from a letter sent to Dave.

On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 06:39 PM, Sandra Gans wrote:

Hi Dave,
You should have received the IntelliTXT tags from John Kamoosi on Tuesday.
Please let me know if you did not receive, or if you need any
assistance with implementation.
We have pre-blocked Microsoft ads.

That led to the the following post. Intellitext is now disabled. But, I would like to keep this post and the accompanying threads in the database.

We will halt operations until we discover the source of the Intellitext and Microsoft ads. No additional stories will be posted until the adverse material is removed from our site.

You have to be logged out to see the embedded text. Please do so and take a look at the words they have chosen to trigger their obnoxious advertising. In the meantime, please enjoy some articles below we have written about our friends in Redmond.

Update: intellitext ads have been removed.

To see one of the ads click on Read more below. It's a Get the Facts ad on the keyword "Linux".

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4, DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MMX/SSE(2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim's and RealPlayer's binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs. It has basic VCD/DVD playback functionality, including DVD subtitles, but supports many text-based subtitle formats too. For video output, nearly every existing interface is supported. It's also able to convert any supported files to raw/divx/mpeg4 AVI (pcm/mp3 audio), and even video grabbing from V4L devices.

Marketing suggests Office users will evolve reptilian heads.

Hi,

At the end of voting, with 428 Ballots resulting in 390 votes from 369 developers, "GFDL-licensed works without unmodifiable sections are free" has carried the day.20

RAID 6, SATA 3Gb/s Storage Systems, Controllers on Display at IDF

The TurboAJAX Group has two released in one: TurboWidgets and TurboDbAdmin 0.2.

TurboWidgets is one of the first (if not the first) commercially available widget package built on the Dojo Toolkit. Naturally, TurboWidgets inherits all of Dojo’s AJAX goodies for free. TurboWidgets features TurboGrid, a fully dynamic AJAX data grid supporting editing, row manipulation, and paging.

Novell is dropping its own name from its newest desktop software and rebranding it as SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

Kdb+ v. 2.3 Multithreaded Database Helps Trading Firms Take Full Advantage of New Multicore CPUs Without Having to Change Their Existing Applications

Analysis 'Lightweight, high-velocity and very connected' Explaining why she decided to sell the company, whose only product has been in a limited, closed beta for just six months, co-founder Claudia Carpenter wrote -

"We like lava lamps and they're pretty much standard decor at Google."

[ED: A really cynical take on market hysteria where Google is just one of the bad actors. - HC]

As you can see, my experimentation with Linux is not quite over. After writing last week’s column about my troubles installing Skype for Linux, I got an email from a Linux user who knew how to fix the problem. Interestingly, the online version of my column posted by Whistler Question each week (www.whistlerquestion.com) was added to a Linux User’s Group (or LUG), and I got no fewer than seven responses in the two days after publication, all different, on how to fix the problem.

[ED: Here is a salient quote: "I find it very interesting that there is such a fervent and dedicated community of Linux users who want to help each other." Who was it that said LUGs were so yesterday. I hope I never see that day. - HC]

Analog - www logfiles Analizer Installation and Configuration in debian

The new general public licence has arrived. Paul Furber celebrates the Great Leap Forward of 2006.. "As you are aware from your compulsory weekly education classes, the old general public licence has resisted all attempts to overcome it. Many have tried. All have failed. Millions of companies have gone bankrupt trying to make money from it and over 100 governments have collapsed trying to oppose it -- which is, of course, just as we intended."

Mark Mitchell announced the availability ofGCC 4.0.3. He explains, "this release is a bug-fix release for problems in GCC 4.0.2. GCC 4.0.3 contains changes to correct regressions from previous releases, but no new features." GCC 4.0.2 [story] was released nearly 6 months ago in September of 2005. GCC 4.1.0 [story] was released in early March of 2006.

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.0.3 from a gcc.gnu.orgmirror.

With more than 1500 improvements since the first beta release of the 1.5 series, the KOffice developers invite the user community for the final round of testing of KOffice 1.5 before the first release candidate.

I also learned that people were not near as computer stupid as I had assigned them to be. While the Windows users just accepted the errors and mistakes, the Linux users were digging in the forums and wikis, trying to understand their new computers.

Due to circumstances outside of our control, we're going to be unable to keep to the scheduled date of March 15th for the release of FC5 and instead are going to have to make the release date Monday, March 20th.

With SGI Altix Option, New and Existing SAP Customers Can Improve ROI With Flexible Linux Environments

[ED: Just wish SAP(ians) would make up their minds: either F/OSS stinks or it's Great! Come on, you been studying out in the Sun too long. - HC]

An update to the company's premium Linux version now supports 64-processor servers. And, bigger configurations are on the way.