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Here's the 2004 story on it: http://www.itworldcanada.com/a... ...basically, they found that Intel+Linux processed Oracle as well as their Solaris boxes, at a fraction of the price-point. They remain the Oracle workhorses.

But not much else; they aren't application servers as a rule. File service is a huge NAT that provides for Windows, Linux and any other file space. And they have a pile of Windows servers, of course.

No Linux desktop, sorry, though a few Macs have made tentative re-appearances in graphic artists shops after a 20-year absence.

Gee I wonder how I got this wrong?

http://www.itworldcanada.com/a...

https://www.thestar.com/busine...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (and the section below about LTE)

Probably the last time that happens though.

That's because Symbian is being discontinued. There will be no more new phones coming out with Symbian. All existing Symbian phones are scheduled to have only one or two more updates before EOL.

Nokia has deprecated Symbian. Nokia won't be making any more Symbian phones due to the exclusive nature of their relationship with Microsoft, even though the number of Symbian users converted to Windows Phone were essentially zero - as any but a fool would have expected. The deal essentially eliminated all of Nokia's considerable Symbian profits and revenues, replacing them with not a darned thing. But Symbian is open source, and those things have a way of springing back from the dead. Long after BSD was written off it lives on in OS X and iOS. If carriers want a third ecosystem Symbian with an installed base of still over 300 million is a good bet for it - far better than BB10 or Windows Phone. Symbian needs an open app store ecosystem, and a facelift, a few handset OEM sponsors, a community build that will go onto extant phones for the transition. But that's easier to do than selling 300 million Symbian users Windows Phone when they bought it because it was "not Microsoft".

Nokia got their half-billion Symbian units sold from a bygone era when smartphone sales were much lower. It took them a long time of huge market share to lift that bar so high, it wasn't even until last year that both iOS and Android combined could reach it and just this year that both did - due to the huge growth of the smartphone market.

It's late and the thread is old so you're likely the only one left reading this. I'll gift you with some historical juice: Counting coup on Nokia was one of the boxes Bill Gates left unchecked when he retired. He had Nokia envy for a decade. Besting Nokia was an undone task he had to let go to get away. Steve Ballmer, gifted with the CEO slot on the top of a tech and financial bubble, and then cursed with maintaining dividends and share price while the largest stockholder divests felt he didn't have a fair shot at success. Pressed on all sides and ridiculed in every corner Ballmer needed a win like wrecking Nokia to restore his self esteem. So he cheated. One day maybe the tale of how he cheated by subverting the Nokia Board and especially the Chairman in the critical CEO selection moment will be laid bare in some court somewhere. Or not. The connection should be well protected. But that's what happened. Wrecking Nokia by putting a puppet in, destroying the economy of Finland by deliberately bankrupting their biggest taxpayer, impoverishing the many retirees whose retirements rely on Nokia investments is just an intended consequence, a byblow, of Steve Ballmer proving to himself that he can do something even the legendary strategist he subconsciously knows is superior to him - Bill Gates - couldn't do. Steve Ballmer needed a win at any cost, and he got it.

Bill Gates really could have done it, and more gracefully, but it was out of phase with his retirement plan.

I could maybe propose some hypotheticals about how SteveB cheated. You see, as a multibillionaire CEO of what was then the world's largest technology company he travelled in rarified circles and rubbed elbows with movers and shakers. He could suggest, for example, that if some banks invested in a company dedicated to suing users and publishers of the cancerous Linux, they might make good their losses with favorable future tips. He could suggest to US bankers and financiers that they contact Nokia chairman Jorma

to make Apple the most recognized brand in the world

ITYM Coca-Cola.

Go into the fetid, dank mangroves of Senegal. Show the first person you meet two logos.

As of May 2011, Apple is indeed the world's most recognized brand... overtook Coca-Cola some time ago.

citation 1

citation 2

Coca-Cola is now about 8th. FWIW Apple has about 4 times in cash than Senegal's GNP. Point is, I think you may want to find a better measuring stick as brand recognition in Senegal is nearly meaningless.

As far as I'm concerned, Novell stabbed the community in the back. I don't use Novell products and neither should you.

Funnily enough when Hovsepian took over as CEO in 2003 I remember him saying how much Novell would do for the Linux Community. Then a few years ago this Interview.

Lets look at what he did for the Linux Community and for the Developers he thinks are so great:

Novell Plans To Lay Off 20% Of Workforce

Novell offshores for cheap developement

Novell cuts SuSe Develpers

Suse Developer Layoffs

Yup, same thing happened to Mexico around 2002, when some companies (IIRC, Sun and IBM included) were pushing to improve IT in Mexico via Open Source. That, until Bill Gates went to visit our ex-president and made him an "offer he can't refuse".

I am glad Google is building a good browser... it will keep everyone on their toes (especially since Microsoft has pretty much bowed out of the next-gen browser market with their unwillingness to implement standards in a timely fashion).

What I find interesting is just how rapidly this is happening! For our intranet-style application, we've pretty much dropped support for IE altogether, telling our customers to use Firefox, Safari, or Chrome - pretty much "anything but IE". We just write standards-compliant code and almost never bother with IE weirds anymore, we just tell our users to "upgrade to Firefox or Chrome", and they do.

IE8 was Microsoft's big chance, and they blew it. It's *still* not actually standards compliant, at a time when standards compliance is what the marketplace actually wants. Now, they've dumped lots of money and mindshare into a product that still manages to underwhelm.

Microsoft tried to hijack the web development environment with their "dot net" framework, a proprietary application stack with its associated vendor lockin, and an incompatible browser with loads of marketshare.

The only thing they really had to sell was marketshare, and they are losing that as fast as the marketplace can move!

I say we just call this "Strike 1" of the three strikes rules, and move forward with revoking Microsoft's Internet Connection.

For what I'm really saying, see: Word manipulation, hypocrisy, and the so-called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

It looks like the ISPs are standing up to traffic throttling in in response to Google, Amazon and Skype's request to the CRTC to ban traffic throttling.
With big recognizable names like Google, Amazon and Skype backing net neutrality, hopefully the CRTC will be swayed to rule in favor of stopping traffic shaping or at least scrutinize the current behavior of ISPs like Rogers and Bell.
Google, Amazon ask CRTC to stop Internet traffic shaping

This incident does bring up the question of what we will do when a government, NGO, or criminal group like the Mafia decides that Open Source software belongs to them and that people must pay a fee to them for using it...

Which is precisely what you have here. M$ tried via SCO to scuttle Linux. It turned out that SCO hadn't a leg to stand on. So, enter the Novel-M$ SW Patent deal where de Icaza and other receipt-carrying M$ Boosters inject proprietary technology into otherwise free and open source projects. Novell differs from SCO in that this time around there is a trail of receipts showing that yes you do owe M$money for their products even though they were readily available for download.

People have been good about readying the licenses for the main packages, but de Icaza and co. target the libraries and other components that these packages are built on. Combine that with a marketing team that hangs around Slashdot and goes after sites like Boycott Novell and they have made some headway. To be sure, Mono wastes a lot of space on the Ubuntu installation CD. Space which could have been used by Free Software. So even without the sw patent deal, Mono is technologically unsound.

Then there are Novell's attacks against OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument Format. But that speaks for itself.

At the beginning it was simply described as a stupid move. Novell/M$ is a problem that is getting worse, mostly due to the noise they make and the interference they cause in free and open source projects. The patent pact put Novell outside the free and open source software community. The actions since then have only proven this to be more so.

The BSA numbers are highly suspect. Here's their forumla:

Infringement = (machines shipped) * (usage estimate multiplier) - (legal BSA) - (legal non-BSA) - (legal FLOSS)

As Russel McOrmond points out, only two of these numbers are actually known: the number of machines shipped and the amount of legal BSA software. The usage estimate multiplier is an estimate of the average amount of software on a machine in a given region. The essential number, however, may be the amount of legal open source software. How on earth do you calculate that? If it is low, then the piracy numbers could be way off. I distribute some open source code, and even I don't have a clear idea of how many people use it. McOrmond says FLOSS not shipped with a PC is often not included. Read McOrmond's article for an in-depth explanation.

My Mac has only a few BSA apps - the OS, iLife, and Photoshop Elements. How is the BSA to know that I'm also running Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice (all FLOSS), or Scrivener, Tinderbox, and NetNewsWire (all legal non-BSA stuff written by and purchased from individuals)? How about my parents' machines, on which I've installed OpenOffice software? They probably wouldn't remember it was open source even if asked.

I wrote a longer article for IT World Canada that explained the background of these levy systems, as well as suggested a way to analyze when they are a good idea and when they are a bad idea.

Stock Exchanges around the world are making the switch - mostly from HP Non Stop Kernel (NSK) Tandem platforms over to either Linux or Windoze. The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX Group) is following the NYSE lead and just started the plunge into production to (RedHat) Linux as well this past Friday to try and save lots of $ by getting off of the HP Tandem. http://www.tsx.com/en/trading/tsxquantum/news_product_info.html http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Information-Architecture/80e2b1ee-2430-48c0-86ba-7e39ef356a52.html At this point they only have their symbol (X) on the stock exchange but expect to rollout in 2008 with the rest of the stock symbols. If they have a system crash (not because of Linux but the app of course) similar to a few times in the 90s they will have their name all over the news in Canada.

"the processing is done on backend servers (MS ones no less) on MS db engines, handing off SQL Queries to those industrial database engines, letting THEM process it (the bulk of the work), & sending back an answer... this IS all!"

That is a total lie. Not for trades. Nasdeq has never used either Tandem computers or Windows boxes for trades. Ever. Those Tandem computers that were replaced with Windows boxes never handled trades. That has been the exclusive domain of the HP NonStop boxes since 1982. Follow the links I posted. They have all the proof you need - except that you're an astro-turfer, so "proof" won't do if it contradicts the "Microsoft Way."

You go on and on about this "wonderful new" Windows system that can handle 5,000 messages a second. The TSX is testing their new system, running on Linux, that handles 20 x that - 100,000 per second. And its entirely redundant, so fail-over happens without losing a single message/trade/transaction.

Their current benchmark is 320 MILLION per HOUR - its designed to start at 2 billion transactions per trading day (obviously, a trading day is not 24 hours, so its real capacity is almost 10 billion per "real" day). So really, a system that "can be expanded to record up to 8 million new rows of data a day" is only 1/1000 the capacity. 1/1000 - 4 orders of magnitude less. So stop with the shilling for Microcrap. (Actually, the comparison is even worse, since the TSX system will record more than 1 row per transaction, since there's obviously way more than one table involved - its not a glorified flat file).

And what's REALLY NEAT - its home-grown.

1. Those tandem computers were never used for trades, as anyone who follows the links I posted and does any reading would know.
2. The system you're talking about is woefully inadequate in comparison to real systems.

"First off, this IS what I do for a living for a LONG time now, & here is HOW a well designed system today for this, works:

The DB engines from MS, run it pal... THE hard part, for stability, via stored proc return recordset data."

Bullshit Bingo Alert: "THE hard part, for stability, via stored proc return recordset data."

Hard? It takes 10 minutes to teach someone how to code for stored procedures in the *nix world, in c and/or c++. If you think that using stored procedure is complicated, you're in the wrong business. But really, stability comes from code that doesn't have buffer overruns, that allocates and de-allocates resources quickly and cleanly, and can run in a deterministic fashion - and Windows doesn't cut it.

So stop with the stupidity.

Ad to clear up one more piece of astro-turd:

"as well as bugginess supporting Win32 wares, the MOST used on the planet "

Windows is NOT the most used on the planet - its just the most used on the desktop. You forgot everything else, from embedded devices to supercomputers.

So get out of your momma's basement and get a job, get a real life, etc. You're hopeless, even as an astroturfer. Because nobody believes you have 15 months, never mind your claimed "15 years" experience - unless its working at "Worst Buy" selling "Pee-Cees".

Interesting ...

Just today, I was reading an article in ComputerWorld (Canadian edition) about companies that mine the internet for a brand or company, and report flagged items to that company.

Several companies are selling this as a service or as software.

One company is Milton based RepuTrace, another is in Seattle.

They cite a case where workers said they were drunk or high when working, another case of threats against the company, ...etc.

Here is the full article.

IBM is still digging into SCO's near corpse to find the detials of SCO's accusations. Which were, are and for ever more shall be totally bogus.

The difference between the two cases is SCO claimed copyright infringement whereas Microsoft is claiming patent infringement (I believe).

Software patents are so much more vague than copyright, so there's a good chance some of the GNU/Linux operating system is infringing. Remember the study that found 283 possible software patent infringements in the Linux kernel alone? I would be suprised if some of those didn't belong to Microsoft (and that was 2004, there are probably more now).

This public sabre-rattling is not without basis. Seems to me that Microsoft are keeping the specifics under wraps, then threatening companies with them in private. Remember what ex-Novell employee said in this interview? Here's a reminder:

I mean I have had people come up to me and essentially off the record admit that they had been threatened by Microsoft and had got patent cross license and had essentially taken out a license for Microsoft patents on the free software that they were using, which they then cannot redistribute.

It's also funny you should mention this:

Otherwise Microsoft looks like a bigger SCO.

Some people (including this respected legal blogger--at the bottom of that article) believe Microsoft funded and put SCO up to its anti-GNU/Linux FUD litigation. So, really they are a bigger SCO!

For a new deployment, you have to take into account what is in place, what are the weaknesses, and how they are being
addressed by the new thingum. google around for household names with breaches like so:

http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Enterprise-Infrastr ucture/33200565-b133-4eed-8c05-c6f35f8f60b6.html

That article talks about basic things like establishing a perimeter. IF your company does not have a decent DMZ defined,and proper
safeguards wrt Intrusion detection, and properly walling off remote services. If people are sending credit card information via telnet, then you probably want to work on security. A gadget rarely solves anything. security is 99% about people and processes because you have to cover all the bases. The bad guys just have to find one weakness.

Interesting where this has gone. http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Enterprise-Infrastr ucture/b8d0672c-8f02-4228-a867-e160234f12a5.html/

Maybe I should add, that these these statements are not new.

After the school shoot-out in erfurt 2002 the government introduced an age-rating on video games, although Mr. Beckstein and his political friends demanded the full ban of violent computer games.

If you want a balanced report on this, read this article

There's a pretty interesting article posted on Computerworld's site today that details why it's increasingly difficult to find solid IT jobs even though more and more companies are preparing to hire. http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/IT-Workplace/dc4b99 1d-1d3b-4c26-ae56-3bb84c0faf9f.html

"It is time to admit what many security professional already know: We as security professional are drastically failing ourselves, our community and the people we are meant to protect. Too many of our security layers of defense are broken. Security professionals are enjoying a surge in business and growing salaries and that is why we tolerate the dismal situation we are facing. Yet it is our mandate, first and foremost, to protect."

Credit Card Breach Exposes 40 Million Accounts
Bank Of America Loses A Million Customer Records
Pentagon Hacker Compromises Personal Data
Online Attack Puts 1.4 Million Records At Risk
Hacker Faces Extradition Over 'Biggest Military Computer Hack Of All Time'
Laptop Theft Puts Data Of 98,000 At Risk
Medical Group: Data On 185,000 People Stolen
Hackers Grab LexisNexis Info on 32000 People
ChoicePoint Data Theft Widens To 145,000 People
PIN Scandal 'Worst Hack Ever'; Citibank Only The Start
ID Theft Hit 3.6 Million In U.S.
Georgia Technology Authority Hack Exposes Confidential Information of 570,000 Members
Scammers Access Data On 35,000 Californians
Payroll Firm Pulls Web Services Citing Data Leak
Hacker Steals Air Force Officers' Personal Information
Undisclosed Number of Verizon Employees at Risk of Identity Theft

Personally, I don't think iCrave was doing anything wrong. They rebroadcast signals that were received free over-the-air (either commercial-based or public broadcasting) in Toronto (the American signals were violating Canadian air-space). They did not remove the commercials from the signal (just had their own ads on the webpage, outside the streaming video window). If anything, they added value to the network's signal by beaming them to a wider audience (the big TV networks are only now, 7 years later, figuring out that putting their programming on the web is a good thing).

I submitted this as a story back on June 4. Since it was rejected (too verbose?), I posted it to my /. journal. My main question to other folks relates to how this would compare to using a regular ramdisk. The main deficiency with a ramdisk is that you'd have to reload the contents every time you reboot. Here's my article, with all its links:

Giga-byte Technology recently came out with a DRAM-based PC card that operates as a SATA hard drive. The product, iRAM, uses power from the motherboard to keep memory active when the system is shut down. During power outages, the product uses a on-board battery to retain memory for up to 90 minutes. The iRAM card is being talked about in the news (InfoWorld, itWorldCanada, engadget, PCWorld, multiplay forum) as a means of booting Windows faster. That is, you install Windows onto the iRAM drive to take advantage of the RAM's faster read-access time. Just hope that you don't lose power for more than 90 minutes.

Is boot time really that important, since many computers are on all the time? A ramdisk might have better uses, perhaps for caching frequently-accessed files such as databases and webservers. Or, if you insist on having faster bootup, instead of putting Windows on the iRAM disk, why not just store the hibernation file there?

I implemented a RAM-based database for an internet tool in 1998 to alleviate the read/write load on my local hard drive. It turned out to be a simple solution for the problem. At the time, it was just a matter of using a DOS-based ramdisk driver (ramdisk.sys). On application startup, it copied the database files to the ramdisk. During operation, everything was read/written to the ramdisk, and periodic backups were made to the physical disk. There are some inherent risks, such as loss of data during a crash since data isn't immediately written to a physical hard drive, so it may not be a great solution for a mission-critical production database. The iRAM product would make this type of database even more stable, in that the risk of loss of data is much less.

That was a while ago, so I thought I'd look into setting up a ramdisk in XP for some amusement. Follows are the results of that search. It seems that the options are relatively sparse beyond the DOS-based driver. A few freeware and commercial packages are available, though. One key factor beyond price is the size limit of ramdisk.

Microsoft's ramdisk offerings since Win2k are limited. Included with the XP OS is a ramdisk sample driver that "provides an example of a minimal driver. Neither the driver nor the sample programs are intended for use in a production environment. Rather, they are intended for educational purposes and as a skeletal version of a driver." Installation isn't simple enough for most users to benefit.

Alternatives include a shareware ramdisk, AR ramdisk (archive link: http://web.archive.org/web/20041011170408/http:/ww w.arsoft-online.de/products/product.php?id=1) (freeware, 2GB limit, discontinued, available for download here), a freeware (64MB limit) and shareware (2GB limit) version here,

Are stereotypes really that bad that it's scaring some people away from some professions? (I'm not sure if I worded that correctly.)

http://www.itworldcanada.com/Mobile/ViewArticle.as px?id=idgml-e40631b2-274b-45d5-8254-cf2348b75056&f ormat=Print might work better for going to the page.

In December Poland blocked formal approval of the deal, which opponents of the legislation argue will allow patenting of pure software, saying it needed more time to register its concerns about the new rules' impact on small and medium-sized businesses. But Poland has indicated it will not oppose the official adoption of the text of the May deal, due to be agreed to at a meeting of E.U. farm ministers next Monday.

Presumably the industry would follow the lead of Microsoft in this matter.

Particularly for Oracle since Microsoft has indicated its SQL server licensing will be "licensed per processor, not per core"

Just in time, quantum cryptography for the masses.

A swiss company has recently announced a commercial product allowing a fiber optic channel to be secured with quantum cryptography; this would make tapping (without detection) impossible.

Of course, they could get meaner and ban anyone's right to secure outgoing fiber, which I suppose they would.

Where would we be today if researchers became content with exsisting technology? We could very well still be travelling by steam train and horse and buggy.

I recently read an article on scientists working on optical solutions for miniturization of computers.

Your answer is OpenBSD. I'm not sure of the certification level, but here's a quote from a recent interview with OpenBSD's project head, Theo Deraadt:

"OpenBSD is so secure that it even got the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice, which stores and transmits top-secret data using 260 copies of the OS."

The full article is here.

--Bob