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Amnesiak sent us an interesting interview that Infoworld has done with Linus-questions about the kernel, which distro he prefers, Microsoft/Linux thing and how the Gnome/KDE may sort it out. Standard interview questions, but it's a well done interview.

An anonymous reader sent us an article which describes a new agreement between IBM and Caldera. The two companies will work together to make sure that IBMs stuff works under Linux, as well as make sure that Caldera's stuff screams on Big Blue's hardware. Looks interesting.

Bruce Inglish writes "InfoWorld Pundit (and inventor of Ethernet) Bob Metcalfe just posted his 99/6/19 column entitled: "Linux's '60s technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what will?" in which he predicts that "Linux will fizzle against Windows" and compares the Open Source community to communism and the Back-to-the-Earth Movement. "

Bruce Inglish writes "InfoWorld Pundit (and inventor of Ethernet) Bob Metcalfe just posted his 99/6/19 column entitled: "Linux's '60s technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what will?" in which he predicts that "Linux will fizzle against Windows" and compares the Open Source community to communism and the Back-to-the-Earth Movement. "

dancomfort sent us the news that Group Bull SA, the French computer manufacturer has joined the Linux group as well. They are setting up some new units, as well as certifying some of their servers with Red Hat 6. They are also planning on porting Common Data Security Architecture, in partnership with Intel.

An anonymous reader wrote in to send us a summary of the Palm VII vs the BlackBerry wireless devices. Talks about which would be the better appendage, and the BlackBerry tends to win out- although I've never seen one in person so I can't attest to which is superior.

Slimbob wrote in with the word about UCITA, a wonderful little law that, if passed allows for remote shutdown of software if you violate the license, make shrink wrap license more enforceable, and outlaw reverse engineering, amongst other gems. Get more details here. Thanks to C.Scott Ananian for sending us a UCITA page, with the TeX version of the letter to be sent and more information.

Slimbob wrote in with the word about UCITA, a wonderful little law that, if passed allows for remote shutdown of software if you violate the license, make shrink wrap license more enforceable, and outlaw reverse engineering, amongst other gems. Get more details here. Thanks to C.Scott Ananian for sending us a UCITA page, with the TeX version of the letter to be sent and more information.

Toddius Maximus writes "The on-again off-again partnership between IBM and Motorola to design a single PowerPC architecture appears to be on again. The companies made a joint announcement Wednesday that they will work together on an embedded version of the PowerPC that will be targeted at networking and telecommunications devices.Story here. "

James Outlaw writes "InfoWorld has a very short article about Apple's new PowerBook- code named Lombard. It's slim and reportedly weights about 3.5 lbs. The most interesting feature is that the LCD panel is detachable and replaceable wth a set of goggles." I've been lusting after a vaio for so long, but if this holds true... yum. Might be time to try out LinuxPPC.

Andy Tai writes "This InfoWorld story reports that Intel will go into the ISP business and compete with IBM, AOL, etc." Sure, why not? They have their fingers in all the hardware, why not control it right up to the consumer?

The one and only Eric S. Raymond has submitted his response to the Mind Craft report that we've talked about a bit here lately. This is a good wrap-up type piece which nicely summarizes the flaws with the testing (which range "yeah maybe" to "you gotta be kidding!"). Anyone who thought the tests had any validity should read this. The followingw as written by Slashdot reader, Jargon File Maintainer, Fetchmail Author, Open Source Evangelist, Eric S. Raymond The Mindcraft fiasco

Microsoft's latest FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) tactic may be backfiring.

A 21 April ITWeb story reported results by a benchmarking shop called Mindcraft that supposedly showed NT to be faster than Linux at SMB and Web service. The story also claimed that technical support for tuning the Linux system had been impossible to find.

Previous independent benchmarks (such as "Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX") have found Linux and other Unixes to be dramatically faster and more efficient than NT, and independent observers (beginning with a celebrated InfoWorld article in 1998) have lauded the Linux community's responsiveness to support problems. Linux fans smelled a rat somewhere (uttering responses typfied by "Mindcraft Reality Check"), and amidst the ensuing storm of protest some interesting facts came to light.

1. The benchmark had been paid for by Microsoft. The Mindcraft press release failed to mention this fact.
2. Mindcraft did in fact get a useful answer to its request for help tuning the Linux system. But they did not answer the request for more information, neither did they follow the tuning suggestions given Also, they forged the reply email address to conceal themselves -- the connection was made after the fact by a Usenetter who noticed that the unusual machine configuration described in the request exactly matched that of the test system in the Mindcraft results.
3. Red Hat, the Linux distributor Mindcraft says it asked for help, reports that it got one phone call from them on the installation-help line, which isn't supposed to answer post-installation questions about things like advanced server tuning. Evidently Mindcraft's efforts to get help tuning the system were feeble -- at best incompetent, at worst cynical gestures.
4. An entertainingly-written article by the head of the development team for Samba (one of the key pieces of Linux software involved in the benchmark) described how Mindcraft could have done a better job of tuning. The article revealed that one of Mindcraft's Samba tweaks had the effect of slowing their Linux down quite drastically.
5. Another Usenet article independently pointed out that Mindcraft had deliberately chosen a logging format that imposed a lot of overhead on Apache (the web sever used for the Linux tests).

So far, so sordid -- a fairly standard tale of Microsoft paying to get exactly the FUD it wants from a nominally independent third party. But the story took a strange turn today (22 Mar) when Microsoft spokesperson Ian Hatton effectively admitted [8] that the test had been rigged! "A very highly-tuned NT server" Mr. Hatton said "was pitted against a very poorly tuned Linux server".

He then attempted to spin the whole episode around by complaining that Microsoft and its PR company had received "malicious and obscene" email from Linux fans and slamming this supposed "unprofessionalism". One wonders if Hatton believes it would be "unprofessional" to address strong language to a burglar caught in the act of nipping the family silver.

In any case, Microsoft's underhanded tactics seem (as with its clumsy "astroturf" campaign against the DOJ lawsuit) likely to come back to haunt it. The trade press had largely greeted the Mindcraft results with yawns and skepticism even before Hatton's admission. And it's hard to see how Microsoft will be able to credibly quote anti-Linux benchmarks in the future after this fiasco.

P.J. Hinton writes "Newt Gingrich, of all people, is made some interesting remarks at the Internet Commerce Expo. He warned attendees to keep an eye on government efforts to regulate the net, exhorting them to keep the politicians and the press educated so that we don't have the "ignorant creating the impossible." He also drove home the need for high speed access in the home. His remark, "to have every home in America have a T1 line," is something that sounds good to me ;-). " No, not every home. Even just my home would be fine.

Accidental Angel writes "As reported in InfoWorld, Tony Occleshaw, IBM's software strategist for Europe, Middle East, and Africa said at CeBIT today that "No one runs large, million-hits-per-day Web sites on Linux." " Well, we served 640,000 pages on Wed on this Linux box. And the server load is only 2.00-3.00. I figure this box can handle around a million. The adfu server (also Linux) did around a million hits total that day, if you combine banner ads + layer HTML).

Accidental Angel writes "As reported in InfoWorld, Tony Occleshaw, IBM's software strategist for Europe, Middle East, and Africa said at CeBIT today that "No one runs large, million-hits-per-day Web sites on Linux." " Well, we served 640,000 pages on Wed on this Linux box. And the server load is only 2.00-3.00. I figure this box can handle around a million. The adfu server (also Linux) did around a million hits total that day, if you combine banner ads + layer HTML).

Well, starting this morning, DELL are starting to sell Linux pre-installed on selected workstations, dell asks for additional 99$ for the installation. Full report from News.com is here. Speaking of pre-installing, IBM just told Info-world reporters that they will keep selling Linux servers, but they will "wait-and-see" about selling Workstation pre-installed with Linux. Am I the only one who thinks that IBM need to learn about selling from Dell?

Jabberwocky writes "Well, it didn't happen overnight, but Microsoft claimed that on Wednesday it will be able to demonstrate that it can indeed meet the $1 million challenge issued by database arch rival Oracle in November 1998. The whole thing hinges on whether or not "anyone using Microsoft's SQL Server with a 1 terabyte TPC-D database to run a standard data-warehouse business query within 100 times of Oracle's best published performance." Microsoft is aparantly going to give it a shot using SQL Server 7.0 which it just released. "

An anonymous reader sent us a link to an InfoWorld story where you can read about IBM slapping together an Open Source Supercomputer capable of matching a Cray on PovRay benchmarks. It's basically just a cluster of Xeon based Netfinitys. Smooth.

EmilEifrem writes "Just in case you guys felt like posting something about Java, Infoworld says that Java2 is due to be released Thursday. Is it Thursday over there yet? " It supposedly will be online after it propogates to the mirrors.

So I'm here at the Babylon Cafe, and all these people are chatting and drinking and having fun, and I'm in the corner posting morph- is asking for someone with a lick of design sense to design a Logo for SlashNET- email him if you come up with one. 600x150 pixels on black. mschmitt linked us to the UNIX pronunciation HOWTO. Carlie Fairchild wrote in to plug The Linux Journals online Store. An anonymous reader sent us a link to an InfoWorld article that talks about the recent warring in the free software movement. President John F. Kennedy wrote in to tell us that Propoganda 4 is out if you're looking for sweet background images. cpfeifer sent us a link to a site that is selling aluminum light sabers. I bet they don't work, but I still want one. Brian Craft sent us a link to the most Unusual Ergonomic Keyboard that I've seen in awhile. Lord Hiades sent us a link to a t-shirt based on Adminspotting. cpfeifer sent us a link to The Jesus Dance. An anonymous reader sent us a link to a freaky site where you can get funky contacts to scare your friends with. An anonymous reader sent us a link to the truth about Steve Balmer

Taz writes "IBM will disable the serial number feature before shipping their PIII. " The question is who will turn it back on? Without asking first?

Manuka writes "An Inforworld article tells us that Sun, in an effort to make Java more accessible, has made the Java 2 source available under a new license. " The new license makes it possible for "developers to use and modify the source code for commercial products free of charge; allows them to change the code without having to return their changes to Sun; and lets developers modify and share source code without involving Sun." A step in the right direction.

An anonymous reader wrote in to sent us a few links to mainstream articles regarding Trinux, a small security-oriented toolkit type Linux distribution that runs in RAM and boots from floppies. One article can be found in InfoWorld, and the other is in c't (most of us will need to babble fish that bugger).

jose nazario writes "hey, just a quick note to say that L0phtcrack, nmap and the IPsec draft all got high nods from InfoWorld's Golden Gaurdian awards for 1998. a brief quote, "The developing IPSec standard also is represented in the third portion of 1998's Goldie, which we bestow on the scope of open-source security solutions. Self-reliance is a central tenet of the security administrator's bible, and 1998 saw the release and improvement of some useful tools for security administrators." enjoy. "

edgy writes "It looks like [Ed: key word is "looks"] Microsoft is going to drop Visual J++ for their own proprietary l anguage which looks to be named COOL, according to this Infoworld article. Word is that COOL will not be cross-platform but will supposedly have enhancements that Java doesn't have." COM+ presents a serious threat to CORBA, and if Windows 2000 COM+ apps become popular, it will only allow MS to strengthen their hold on the desktop

Andy Tai writes "InfoWorld awards the "Collaborative Software Community" (including the Free Software/Open Source community) the Industry Achievement award for 1998. O'Reilly accepts the award on the behalf of the community. Nick Petreley names many important people of Free Software in his award story, including RMS, Linus, ESR, Larry Wall, John Ousterhout, Alan Cox, Jon (maddog) Hall, Robert Young, Jeremy Allison, etc." Suppose this should be in the same article as the next one, but hey, they're both important. They can each have their own story today.

An anonymous read was the first one to say that InfoWorl gave Red Hat Linux the 1998 Operating System of the Year award. This is of course the third year in a row. Congratulations to the boys at Red Hat, but more importantly Congrats to every one of you studmonkeys who wrote code that sits in that thing. Pat yourself on the back.

Phil Gross writes "InfoWorld's Robert X. Cringely is reporting that the US Air Force is considering adding Linux to the list of potential standard military operating systems. It seems the U.S. Air Force has recognized the significance of the momentum behind Linux, according to one reader. Apparently it is asking developers and users if they would be interested in a Defense Information Infrastructure-Common Open Environment (DII COE) segment for Linux. If there is enough interest, Linux would become an "official" operating system for military computers.' I'd love to get more details on this. "
In related news, Wired is reporting the Navy is reconsidering its use of NT: " the Navy said that while Windows NT was specified in the Statement of Work as the operating system for the workstations in question, other components of a coming upgrade will primarily utilize Unix-based systems. The source said. "I don't think that Unix or NT were ever really evaluated -- it was just somebody thinking this was good, with no knowledge"". Thanks to brentbent

chrisd sent us a link to a nice little InfoWorld Article on our friends over at VA Research. Mentions the specs of their latest speed demons and talks about them getting some capital.

Infoworld has a feel-good article about Linux' recent growth, and things we can expect from Linux-friendly industry giants in the future. Link from LWN.

Harris Vaegan-Lloyd writes "Cobalt networks have just released the Qube2, with a whole lot of new features to make everyone's lives easier, so why would you want a netwinder now huh? New features are modem control, scheduled backup to remote servers, DHCP server, better email alias handling & better mailing lists and too much to type here.. Hardware is now 2 ethernet ports, a serial card and a new 250Mhz mips chip (Qunatum Effects Dynamic.). And a new power connector to replace the old one that kept falling out! Yay! ;). " An anonymous reader also sent us a link to a review of this new toy.

rdsmith writes "This week's Info World has a short article on Linux and its growth over the past few years. It makes a couple of mentions of ESR and the Halloween document. Although the article bases Linux's growth on numbers provided by Redhat, it's still good press for Linux. "

Andy Tai writes "This InfoWorld story reports on RedHat's choice of GNOME as the desktop for the next version of its Redhat Linux. While the story is nothing new, this is a sign that GNOME has captured "mainstream" attention." The IDC analyst quoted does not seem to realize that GNOME is optional.

mackga writes "Nick Petreley seems a bit put off by Linux advocates. A slight dig at the OSS movement? This one is interesting, seeing how Nick P. is involved w. Linux World. " Overall, I'd say it's a fairly good natured jibe at things.

Assaf Arkin writes "InfoWorld is running an excellent article on the shaky future of the Wintel marriage, the investment in Linux apparently is the prime crack in this love story. You can also voice you opinion on where Linux will be going in '99. "

Assaf Arkin writes "InfoWorld is running an excellent article on the shaky future of the Wintel marriage, the investment in Linux apparently is the prime crack in this love story. You can also voice you opinion on where Linux will be going in '99. "

zollinger writes "This weeks InfoWorld has a story about how "Handhelds Bring Holiday Headaches." Most of this stuff has been seen here before, but some nice stuff about wearable PC's being the future of PDAs. The last quote in the story says about PDA's: "These things proliferate like a virus." "

Dawn Keyhotie writes "How do you know when Linux has become part of the mainstream? When a major software package is released and one of its 'cons' is that it doesn't support Linux (yet). Check out this review of Java2 (a.k.a. JDK 1.2) on the world-renowned ZDNet. Of course, it would be too much to expect that Linux would be mentioned in the actual body of the article. But there it is in the sidebar, big as life. "

Jim Williams writes "There is an interesting article on Infoworld at describing Microsoft's new ClearType "technology". The article is mostly gibberish, with phrases like "We are able to address the area in between the pixels" but if I understand it, they seem to be making a fuss about oversampled, antialiased rendering, which has only been around for a decade or two. These guys should get out more." Somebody tell me how this is different from normal antialised text? I don't see it either.

J Widjaja writes "Infoworld carries an article which describe recent advances and challange on chip technology. This article gives nice overview of chip industry direction."

Sun is opening up the Java API design process. It only took them a kick in the teeth to realise they had to do something, but hopefully the lesson has been learnt. I hope the Linux-membership discount will be the full $5000.

Andy Tai writes "This InfoWorld article talks about the warming relationship between Unix vendors and the Linux community, since it "is spawning a new front in the war between Unix and Windows NT. " It mentions that Linux International will submit a standard to the Open Group in hope of getting the Unix 98 branding. Also Sun is considering porting Solaris APIs to Linux. HP is considering Linux, while Microsoft claims that Linux will further divide the Unix marketplace."

In a U-turn that will be welcomed by all members of the Linux community who still have to use a Windows box to access Lotus Notes at work, Lotus has announced that it is looking into porting its SmartSuite and Notes/Domino suites of applications to Linux. It would also make SmartSuite open-source. This link was found on Linux Today. Unlike the analysts of the story, I believe this is a low-cost (type make) move which will be very lucrative to Lotus (many Linux users in Fortune 500 companies, have 2 PCs, one for the company standards of Notes/Office (Windows) and one to do real work on (Linux). For those that do not know SmartSuite, it's a pretty awesome suite of office applications, including Voice Recognition -- I really hope this too will be open-sourced: Lotus Organizer time and contact manager, Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, Lotus Freelance Graphics presentation graphics, Lotus Word Pro word processor, Lotus Approach database, Lotus ScreenCam multimedia, IBM ViaVoice for Word Pro and 1-2-3, Lotus Mail Internet e-mail. update: "will port" to "looking into porting". However, given that the Strategy vice president said it was just a question of a recompile, if enough people want it it should happen.

The OS Counter has been stopped due to unfounded complaints by Israeli sysops of "hack attacks". The fact that Israeli newspapers followed up on this without checking into the facts, but assume Lebanese involvement indicates to me a rather paranoid state of mind. Alternatively two stories got mixed up -- the scenario I hope happened. Please encourage hans to continue his valuable work. For those interested, Infoworld discusses the Queso method used. Links found on Linux Today. updated I misspelled Queso Questo. Fixed. Thanks to the rude AC for pointing that out so kindly.

Andy Tai writes "Printer makers are working together to define a single universal printer driver. Called the Universal Printer Driver Format, it will replace the 3000 printer drivers in existence. UPDF will allow the characteristic of each printer to be described in a text file, residing in the printer itself." S: This effort is 2 years old (not related to Intel's initiative) if you look on their website. It looks pretty open from their IPP pages, including specs and apparently joining is free. Looks to me like an area where Linux participation may be beneficial for Linux and the PWG by providing early widespread testing (if printer manufacturers release descriptions for existing printers in file format before actually including them in their newer printers).

Ed Finch writes "There's an article on InfoWorld Electric in which Oracle reaffirmed its commitment to Linux at ALS." Interestingly Oracle stated that existing support from Red Had, SUSE and the like betters their own, somewhat casting doubt on previous reports that Oracle was to provide its own support service. (Speculation: perhaps that news came from internal discussions at Oracle. The director of Oracle's Intel Technical Divison, Parikshit Bhaduri seemed pretty open to some idea of Linux support by his company.) Ed continues: "Note the sharp contrast about the eventual support of Baan, PeopleSoft and SAP on Linux between Oracle's statements and HP's "

Our favorite company has been having difficulties remembering what they innovated (ever) lately. So much so, that on the one hand they claim Linux is a competitor (built by a single individual...) and on the other don't see Linux as a threat because no company owns it. (This last statement was not made by Microsoft itself, but probably reflects what they believe. However, even if Linux were to dominate the PC market, they would still be a dominant force: webTV and Dreamcast are two very effective means of dominating the market of those who would like to access the internet (and want to play games) while not having the money to buy a complete PC. WinCE targets both the above and many PDAs, while Embedded NT will attack markets such as hospital equipment (adding new meaning to the phrase "Oh my God!") and network routers. True, Linux ports may be attempted to some of these platforms, but if they cannot run the games, who will use them?) Now we need only wait until Monday for the fun and games to begin. However students at the Auburn University have already started to have their fun. Read on below. shaldannon writes "Mark showed up a Microsoft recruiting agent tonight in front of an audience of 200+. The Auburn University chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery hosted a meeting for its membership at which Microsoft recruiters spoke on the subject of 'why Microsoft is the place to work.'

Mark, an easy-going guy who also runs the Linux Support Services site, showed up in his green penguin shirt. As the meeting progressed, the recruiter, named Colleen, asked eight volunteers to come forward to help her demonstrate the composition and duties of a Microsoft product team.

I nudged Mark, and we both headed to the front to participate. A half dozen Linux users in the room began to nudge each other and grin when they saw Mark's shirt, which has a quote by the great Linus on the back. The recruiter asked for someone with vision to step forward, to represent the "Project Leader." Mark was the natural choice--because his vision is Linux--but she was totally oblivious to this.

The meeting progressed, with the recruiter going through the various positions in a software team while some of the Linux users in the back (John, in particular) passed notes around explaining the irony of the situation to the rest of the audience.

Towards the end, she asked where we thought Microsoft got ideas for its products. From on stage, behind her, Mark piped up with "from other companies!" She turned and observed, "Someone in here is a smartass," not realizing that Mark was flaunting the greatest challenge to Microsoft, right on his chest--the happy penguin."

Thanks also to Cowering In Fear, ColonelPanic, and Dan Kegel for some of the material used here.

Infoworld's rumor column is reporting that Allaire (Cold Fusion) and NCR (Teradata) are considering Linux ports... World domination by the year 2000?

Apparently Sun has scrapped its plans for a family of Native Java chips. Despite that, other manufacturers are building Java Chips. Remains to see whether IBM (a MicroJava 701 licensee) will do, given its Java strategy

Christian Selig writes "InfoWorld has taken a look at the Prerelease of Oracle 8 for Linux. Here is the story. " Fairly positive. Compares a bit with Sybase as well.