Slashdot Mirror

Titten writes "Computerworld reports that Phoenix BIOS software is available for Crusoe. Phoenix worked in secret with Transmeta for more than two years to prepare its PhoenixBIOS software for use with Transmeta's chips. Here's a release from Phoenix. I guess we'll be seeing computers with the Crusoe chip sometime soon now!"

apsmith wrote in wondering what software makers (like Microsoft) will be doing with their software versioning now that we've passed the year 2000 milestone. It's a humorous look at software versioning and it poses some interesting questions. What do you do when you cease using a sensible versioning system in favor of marketing hype (ala "Windows 2000")? Click below for the full text.

apsmith asks: "As I just heard that Microsoft is naming the next version of its database SQL Server 2000 it got me wondering - what happens to all these software products with big "version numbers" in a couple of years when 2000 seems like ancient history? Will we see more factor-of-20 leaps to Office 65535, Windows 1048575, etc? Merely modifying the fourth digit of the version number seems too insignificant to make upgrading seem worth the hassle - does Windows 2008 catch your eye any differently than Windows 2005?

It's not just Microsoft products that seem to have written themselves into a corner with high version numbers, though they are probably the worst. But even Emacs is up to version 20. Sun pushed Solaris from 2.6 to 7. RedHat at 6.1 is somehow way beyond the Linux kernel. At the other extreme is the model that Donald Knuth took for TeX, with the version numbers slowly approaching Pi (the latest teTeX distribution has TeX version 3.14159) but TeX hasn't changed much in the last 10 years either, so a lot of extra pieces have evolved around it to keep it functional.

In the real non-hyped world it seems any version number over 5 or 6 implies it's about time to switch to a new product or start over from scratch. There are countless examples - from recent history think of libc6 -> glibc2 (a bit of a mess there), HTML 5 -> XHTML, or perhaps even Netscape 5 -> Mozilla. Or is that just a geek's view of the universe? How should we be numbering our products these days? And what is Microsoft going to do after 2000? "

LinuxGrrl write to us with a ComputerWorld.Com story regarding the recent hoopla of the Sun/Inprise JDK. Sun has apologized to the Blackdown team.

relaye writes "The performance clustering software and services announced today by Linux vendor TurboLinux Inc. and a cabal of partners including Unix vendor SCO Inc. takes the Linux market in an unusual and somewhat risky direction, analysts are saying. " The article cites risks of forking the kernel - not an incredibly probable risk, but a thought-provoking scenario. The danger comes if Linus decides not to incorporates TurboLinux's changes into the kernel.

Hedonick writes "Seems like a combination of maturity on Linux behalf and bloat on Microsofts part has prompted GM to investigate the possibility of replacing their NT based solution with a Linux based for it's dealerships according to ComputerWorld The whole plan seems to be a bit tentative at the moment but the guy they interviewed, David E. Hutka, is the operations manager for GM:s dealership network and makes some good points on why Linux would be a good (and bad) choice." Unfortunately, it looks like they have a lot of legacy code that may require porting, but it's still good news.

clawson writes "Looks like Congress just can't resist it anymore. This story, mentioned in The Naked PC e-zine, is in ComputerWorld. Yeah, right, the tax will go to fund teacher salaries. This is pretty lame when the current congressional mindset is pretty much doing what it can to ensure that there aren't TOO many smart people in the future, but lots of semi-literate, idiotic consumeroids."

A Slashdotter wrote to us with the story about Home Depot testing Linux for an all-store roll-out. Due to the chain's massive growth, they are desperately in need of top notch remote management for all of their machines. Pilot-testing with Linux boxes is being down this summer.

kabir writes "Computerworld Daily reports that a House of Representatives Subcommittee has just passed a bill (H.R. 850) easing crypto export restrictions. Interestingly, there are also clauses preventing government officials from forcing people to decrypt data. It's not law yet, but looks like it's headed that way. " It passed unanimously in the subcommittee and is headed out to the general House.

Rewbob writes "Northwest arlines is spending $34 million to convert its flight simulators to linux. " Nifty practical applications. Normally when neat toys like this come along, I beg for someone to send me one, but for some reason, I don't expect NW to ship an airplane simulator over to the Geek Compound. But the best part is that there will be one less Fortran program out there *grin*.

elsewhere sent us Linux gushes savings for oil giant where you can read about the 32 node beowulf cluster being used by an oil company to replace IBM super computers.

assimilated writes "In the April 26th issue of Computerworld, president and CEO of SCO made a few well-put comments about the Linux "religion". I think he was right on. A legitimate vendor speaks out... Read the article to get fussy. " Hehe-I had no idea I was working for the Catholic Church. Does that mean I can't get married after all?

sean dreilinger writes "Hotel franchisor eyes low cost, stability of Linux, but says the OS has its drawbacks. Cendant Corp., the world's largest franchisor of hotels, is rolling out Linux servers at about 4,000 hotels to run the company's hotel management software. " It's on the server side, but still a large rollout, nonetheless...

funkwater wrrote in to tell us that Burlinton Coat Factory has been noted as the first significant retailer to deploy the Linux operating system in all 250 stores. Do the responsible parties over there read Slashdot? Want to write something to help convince other companies to join you? This is a great step forward- many people in similiar situations regularly email me to ask for help making this sort of thing happen in their organization. The geeks know. The suits are catching on.

desertfool writes " A good article is running about Burlington's switch to Linux. " Of course, ComputerWorld does call Linux a "shareware" OS, but hey-at least retailors are beginning to see the value of Linux.

axg writes "Contrary to a previous slashdot report, Novell has no immediate plans to open its source". Like the previous case (Lotus), I think we should wait and see what actually happens. Bear in mind that companies tend to study things for ages before committing to anything. If most of the Novell Developers want open-source, Novell says it might open it. Amusingly, the quoted reasons for not opening their source is security (eh?)

Linux Today has another Comdex Report discussing Slackware, SuSe and FreeBSD. And Computer World has an exuberant article about Linux... which does however miss the point that Linux is growing very quickly, invalidating their argument that Linux Users are used to paying little for software. Many newcomers to Linux are used to paying for software. And while many older Linux users (ISPs, businesses, etc) will be happy to buy new apps, I expect a large number of specialist software companies' (think Oracle, Verilog, etc) customers will be migrating from Windows or another Unix.

The head of the Java lobby pleaded with Sun yesterday to open up the language development process. Recent friction between Sun and Embedded Systems manufacturers was also due to the feeling Sun had too much of a controlling interest in the language, and was not addressing the needs of its partners.

Sean writes "Computerworld has an article about the introduction of freeware (Linux and Apache) to enterprise computing. " As usual it shows that people who don't know rely on reputation rather than trying to educate themselves. On the other hand Linux is gaining a good reputation...

Chris Lawder sent us this news story about the backpedaling that is happening with NT5.0 It appears Jim Allchin, NT God, has been making the rounds with apologies for all involved. In other areas, corp-type are starting to get fed-up with the problems they are having with this not-quite-ready-yet product. Remember-no gloating for at least a little bit.

Jeff Monks writes "Computer World has a short article about SGI's newest Cray machine - 2,048 processors! I bet it plays a mean Quake... "

Vladimir Vuksan writes "It appears that HP has renewed its commitment to UNIX due to "realization that the Unix business was contributing value" to HP and business enterprises and also the "reality that NT wasn't going to be the answer" to industry needs of business-critical applications, he said. Link to the ComputerWorld article with this quote is at this location"