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For a less charitable view, see here http://www.linuxandmain.com/features/challenger.ht ml/ It is instructive to compare the two articles. They were a litle more forthcoming about the fate of the Columbia astronauts.

Loki is a bad example, yet I understand why people use it. It is the most well known. But that doesn't make it a good example. I purchased many loki games. I spent some time on the newsgroups, both giving and recieving help. When loki went down the tubes, at first, I mourned the loss of the company. Then I found out what really happened.

It appears to me that Scott Draeker really mishandled the assets of the company, taking out loans that he could not pay back, and putting the money into his personal accounts. Just because one person mishandled the assets of the company doesn't mean that their product was not selling. In most cases, when a business goes under, it is because of a bad product. In this case, I believe that it is because of corruption. It is not fair to use the example of Loki as a reason that selling Linux games would not work, however, life isn't fair.

As an aside, I have looked at GarageGames, but I do not buy their games, as they are not the type that I play. It seems that they are, for the most part, simple puzzle games, which do not appeal to me.

as Ransom Love once said...

I wonder where this will end?

It DID happen. Loki heard the clamor, released a bunch of games, then went belly up because all the people who had insisted for years that they'd buy linux games if they came out turned out to be lying.

Powerbasic DOS compiler apparently works just fine under DOSEMU.

hrm, that's not what he said earlier:

----QUOTE----
"For more than two decades, the SCO name has been synonymous with reliability, stability and cost efficiency. Now, the coexistence and collaboration of UNIX and Linux systems from a single source offers our customers and channel partners a powerful choice of solutions, backed by a name that powers millions of servers around the world - SCO."
---ENDQUOTE---

Darl McBride, CEO and President of SCO, as quoted in Linux and Main Aug 26, 2001.

~Will

So it's not really a fair example. Take a look at the harrowing tale. It would be a shame if we collectively forgot this early part of Linux (in business) history and wrote if off as an example of why Linux isn't ready for business. Loki, or more specifically, Scott Draeker wasn't ready for business.

Besides, lets not write off companies like Linux Game Publishing (or ID Software or Epic Games or ..).

Loki went out of business due to bad management, not lack of interest from gamers. Check out this article.

Bzzt! Wrong answer.

If you think Loki went out of business because there was no money to be made doing native Linux game ports, you need to read this. It may have been a problem, but it certainly wasn't the biggest one.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people are living under the same bad assumption as the parent. Maybe someone else will take another crack at this, and do it right next time.

Here's the rasterman article at linux and main where he does indeed say what you have posted. Your post sounds like flamebait, but upon reading the links, you're right.

The final release of Red Hat Linux X is codenamed "Cambridge". Now we can start brainstorming the connection between Severn and Cambridge.

"Red Hat to change development model, abandon shrinkwrap"

Red Hat to change development model, abandon shrinkwrap

The company's next major release, codenamed "Cambridge," will not be provided in boxed, retail form, according to company communications with employees and developers, which have been made available to Linux and Main.

Additionally, Red Hat plans extensive changes in its development and distribution model. The changes will begin with development lists being made public, and will be followed by return of package maintanence to the developers themselves. Currently, packages are "handed over" to Red Hat developers, who then tune them for inclusion in a particular version. Under the new system, developers will maintain control of the packages.

The company hopes that the changes help to overcome the long lead time needed to produce boxed sets. With a six-month release cycle, and with the rapid pace of Linux development, many packages shipped on CD are obsolete before they ever reach retail shelves.

Recently, I initiated a project on behalf of OSAF to take a careful look at the state of Linux on the desktop, and asked Bart Decrem to spearhead a short-term research project to assess the current situation and trends.

Of course, the last time we heard from this guy, he was explaining, "My big gripe about KDE is I think it's butt-ugly. The main reason I keep using GNOME is that the icons on KDE are aesthetically offensive to me. And the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant." The new report is Slashdotted, but I'm curious to see what other letters are slowing Linux adoption on the desktop.

At any rate, at least this story should generate some life on Slashdot. I'm trying to avoid doing work, and the last five stories are still in single digits for comments, including FP! trolls.

They will most likely be sued by other Linux companies when IBM is through with them for hurting Linux sales.

I hope! :-)

Ignore the command-line until you want to bother with it. I prefer to use it because that's the way I learned, but it'll take longer if you're used to the pointy-clicky approach.

Now to the point of my post. Games. I'm not even going to create a link, because I'm not a sadist. But I will say two words: "Frozen Bubble". Seriously, there are games, but if you're really into games you'll want to keep Windows around.

> In the other hand, in Linux and Main [linuxandmain.com] they have a mostly negative review.

This is an article about a specific installation problem. The real Linux and Main SuSE 8.2 Pro Review ends with "But again, once it's up and running, SuSE 8.2 Professional is great."

In the other hand, in Linux and Main they have a mostly negative review.

But, at least for me, it installed without problems in the systems I tried, and it looks more mature than 8.1, is not just a package versions upgrade.

click here to see a Ximian Gnome 2 preview
as a Kde 3.1 user myself, i think it doesnt quite compare..

Well, at last he includes a link to a screenshot of MSBOB running in vmware, running in KDE. wtf? is that the one worthwhile image to include in a review of the new gnome desktop?

--Sean

It's Linux and Main.

For those of you looking for a history of OS/2 and its marketing, try this article.

I'm quite serious about this, and there's actually a link: It's easier to adopt a better system (OS or measurement units) when you don't have to incurr horrifically high conversion costs.

As much as I'd like to see Linux grab 30 or 40% of the US desktop marketshare, it just won't happen. The open/free software crowd won't (not can't, but won't) do the things necessary to overcome those high conversion costs for users deeply entrenched in Windows.

For a much more detailed version, see
this.

If you really want people like Texas Instruments to do something that would make a lot more sense, you would push for them to release an expanded line of DSP's and hardware that is container and codec agnostic. Demand more from your chips. Don't tell TI 'design a chip for MPEG-4,' tell them to stop making chips that require hideously expensive compilers and NDA's.

That looks sensible, but then you say:

I don't want TI to make chips that just support Ogg. I want TI to make chips that support stuff today, and give me at least a fighting chance on supporting tomorrow's Codec du Jour. People freak out if they buy a home computer that won't last them for a year.

I'm floored. Why don't you want TI to build Ogg chips? There's little in the electronics industry more general than a home computer, and you know that the reason most won't last for more than a year is a matter of abusive prorgraming by certian software vendors. Would'nt a little hardware support for patent free technology help fix things? While stuff like this is nice, would'nt it be great to have $2.00 OGG players hanging out in the toy section at Wal Mart? Is there something I don't know about those $2.00 MP3 players?

I honestly believe that Loki fell, not because Linux geeks "don't want to buy software", but "don't want to buy 6-12 month old games".

I vote for mismanaged into the ground.

OSX is not bitmaps, its vectors.

OSX does realtime scaling this means you can scale a movie down in realtime while its playing and see it playing while its happening, it also allows you to scale icons in realtime, this is mainly due to the PDF based API and the design but it manages to do it.


Actually, certain X driver (Matrox, NVIDIA) *do* accelerate XRender in hardware. Quartz, right now, does everything in software, and can't even theoretically do stuff in hardware (blame Display PDF) without a lot of overhead in translating the format.
Xrender is not powerful enough is my point.

OSX jaguar uses Quartz extreme which does everything in hardware, you are thinking of the Quartz which was released years ago not the current.

The future is stuff like EVAS and Longhorn
Rasterman has totally given up on Linux on the desktop, read the interview
Linux on the desktop dead by Rasterman

Longhorn looks just like XP, Microsoft is working on it, but if you honestly believe Microsoft is innovative enough to actually be the future of the desktop, you must have been blind for the past 5-6 years.

OSX has its flaws but Display PDF works very well, Its working better than Longhorn, and better than Linux, perhaps in 5 years when Microsoft catches up and in 2-3 years when Linux catches up Apple will be just about ready to release OS11.

By the way I've checked out the mailing lists, a Vector API takes longer than months to develop, its going to take them at least a year to fully develop it considering its only 2 guys writing it. Thats why I said 2-3 years Linux will catch up, because it will take about a year for the Vector API to be complete, then another year for KDE to actually use it, then another year before all the themes are actually made to take advantage of it, so 2-3 years is a good estimate.

If the proprietor isn't recapturing all the savings he achieves for you IN THE LONG RUN, he's throwing away the advantage the monopoly gives him [3]. In the short run, of course, monopolists can subsidize you while you grow dependent, but they will only do this if they think that they will be able to get that money back, with interest, in the long run.

The only flaw in the argument is a relatively small one: the author does not address the difficulty of actually extracting the monopoly rents from the proprietor's customers. In practice, it won't be possible to extract 100% of the rents from 100% of the customers. I say that's a small flaw, because software proprietors such as MS and Oracle have obviously been able to extract enough of the monopoly rents from enough of their customers. If you think you can manage to get the better of an outfit like MS or Oracle in the long run, you're in a small and fortunate minority. Or, you're deluding yourself.

[1]See this slashdot comment for my experience with service contracts for proprietary solutions. They aren't good.

[2]Notice that this same argument can be applied to your certifications: any value that an MS or Cisco cert has to you can be extracted from you, at least in part, by the proprietor in the form of high fees for testing, recertification, et cetera.

[3] If it's a publicly-owned company, the stockholders will not be pleased. The stock price will fall, and the benevolent manager will be out on his ear.

Sincere Choice
Open Source Initiative
Why Free Software's Long Run TCO must be lower
Open Source is good for America - US military advised (This is about the military, but parts can also apply to business. Read the report linked at the end of that article.)

This paper argues that the long run total cost of operations (TCO) for a suite of proprietary software must necessarily be greater than that for an equivalent suite of free software, with the TCO benefits maximised in the case of the GPL and GPL-like free software... read on..!

Kernel developers also want to have him banned from the LKML for constantly spamming it with off-topic political discussions. Story here.

The KDE League is essentially a "fan club". It was formed, independent of the actual KDE software projects, to promote KDE.

It would be like ME setting up "The Microsoft League" in my basement, and selling Memberships to, say, Compaq, Intuit Software, Ziff-Davis, and a handful of other corporations who like Microsoft. I would have no direct relationship with Microsoft, I'd just be claiming I want to "promote Microsoft".

In this hypothetical case, Compaq, Intuit, etc. may end up having wasted the money they gave me, but it still has no effect on Microsoft...

Dennis E. Powell posted a somewhat sensational story claiming that the KDE League had ceased to exist, asking "what happened to the money?" and so on. (Several people have accused DEP of having a sort of 'vendetta' against KDE in general over political disagreements he had with people on a KDE-mailinglist-hosted-but-not-KDE-related mailing list (i.e. the 'all topics other than KDE' mailing list) - DEP had posted an editorial which began with an implication that maybe the "K" in KDE was there because it resembled a goose-stepping soldier) Andreas Pour of the KDE League posted a response to DEP's story on the KDE League saying, in essence, "It's merely a clerical error, we're getting it sorted out, and we really can't say much more without approval from our members". DEP posted a story in response saying (my interpretation/summary) - "Delaware says you're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so you have to tell us WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MONEY!". The most recent exchange here seems to be Pour saying "We're not a 501(c)(3), We called Delaware and they said A)They didn't say we were B)Nobody there should say were were and C)No, we're NOT a 501(c)(3)", and DEP's response that he "stands by his story".

As I posted above, I am puzzled why all the noise is coming out of this - it looks like what we have is a handful of rabid pro- and anti- KDE people all getting caught up in the sensationalism. The small handful of ANTI-KDE folks yelling because they want to discredit KDE, and the PRO-KDE folks yelling because they either feel they're being slandered or are worried that the KDE software projects are somehow being "ripped off" by the KDE League (presumably in the mistaken belief that the KDE League is analogous to the Gnome Foundation rather than merely a 'fan club'). The sheer volume of the screaming seems to be bringing attention from a whole mess or more normal people who are trying to figure out what all the fuss is about...

Disclaimer - the above is entirely my interpretation, except were indicated, and could very well be wrong. That IS how I see this issue, though...

Can be seen here.

Perhaps better post the link proving it too.

I just heard the sad news on talk radio. KDE League Inc. nonprofit corporation was found dead. Even if you didn't understand how the League was really supporting KDE, there's no denying its contributions to the promotion and development of free software. Truly an Open Source Icon.

A LinuxAndMain article has some references.

To me, the most critical thing in the Linux market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the Linux market?

Almost a year ago, Alan Cox and myself, expecting the linux market to expand, hired Marcelo Tosatti to maintain Linux 2.4. The the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of our lives documenting, improving and adding features to Linux. Now we have reiserfs, ext3, a robust VM, UML, and the 2.5 development tree. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000,000.

The feedback we have gotten from the thousands of people who say they are using Linux has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought Linux (less than 10% of all computer owners have bought Linux), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on GNU/Linux worth less than $2 an hour.

Why is this? As the majority of users must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at Berkeley for some problem you may have had. Berkeley doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the CD's and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 10-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in Linux software. We have written 3 stable kernels, and are writing Linux-2.5, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to Linux users. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

What about the guys who re-sell Linux, such as linuxmall.com, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give
Linux users a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.

I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at:

3940 Freedom Circle
Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA

Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the Linux market with good software.

Linus Torvalds
Transmeta Corporation

Over the last two weeks a landmark crisis emerged between KDE and RedHat over GPL. The KDE team is probably the largest open source product, and has decided to ignore the FSF/GNU principles that true freedom explicitly means the freedom of NOT having to ask permission to change an open source GPL product and distribute it. In short, the KDE team is demanding "artistic control" and the right to censor the changes made by RedHat.

The FSF failed horribly by allowing this public debate to continue, rather than stepping in promptly and strongly affirming it's principles that free software, especially that lincensed under GPL, does not include the right of censorship that the KDE team is demanding.

While a large percentage of the open source community have open contempt for corporate America, and the growing contempt for and bashing of RedHat has grown beyound a friendly sport, this one issue/event may well be the turning point that forces corporate America to abandon the open source movement.

The bashing of RedHat by KDE over this issue is pure hypocrisy - freedom under GPL was supposed to be freedom for everyone, including corporate America. The FSF/GNU camp failed the movement over the last couple weeks by refusing to openly and agressively defend it's core principles. The KDE team failed the open source movement, by abandoning the core principle of the GPL, and using it's size and stature in the open source community to start what might well be the last debate of a failed ideal.

Power corrupts, and what we are watching unfold, is that the absolute power being demanding by the KDE team, is almost certainly going to corrupt the open source movement and GPL community absolutely as other ego's seek to grab their share of this new power.

Monday, at dawn I sent a written email request to gnu@gnu.org specifically asking three questions. There has been no answer, which is chilling.

1) From this sites web page, the free software definition includes the specific liberty of NOT having to ask permission to make changes and distribute them. Is the KDE team rightfully acting in the spirit of free software and the GPL licenses by demanding this contract term be ignored and RedHat abandon distribution of modified KDE software?

2) Does the FSF/GNU consider the forking of KDE a legal or moral violation of GPL?

3) Are the KDE teams actions regarding this issue, of publicly attacking RedHat for violating their artistic rights to control KDE's evolution consistant with the position of the FSF and GPL licensing?

For those that have missed the quiet war, please check out http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News& file=article&sid=202 and http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News& file=article&sid=203.

I strongly urge everyone that placed their hopes on FSF/GPL to protect one core right to tinker to let gnu@gnu.org know that they MUST defend the principles they stand for, or watch THEIR movement fail as corporate America (nay that of the world) drop open source and GPL lest they be the next target of corporate bashing.

Over the last two weeks a landmark crisis emerged between KDE and RedHat over GPL. The KDE team is probably the largest open source product, and has decided to ignore the FSF/GNU principles that true freedom explicitly means the freedom of NOT having to ask permission to change an open source GPL product and distribute it. In short, the KDE team is demanding "artistic control" and the right to censor the changes made by RedHat.

The FSF failed horribly by allowing this public debate to continue, rather than stepping in promptly and strongly affirming it's principles that free software, especially that lincensed under GPL, does not include the right of censorship that the KDE team is demanding.

While a large percentage of the open source community have open contempt for corporate America, and the growing contempt for and bashing of RedHat has grown beyound a friendly sport, this one issue/event may well be the turning point that forces corporate America to abandon the open source movement.

The bashing of RedHat by KDE over this issue is pure hypocrisy - freedom under GPL was supposed to be freedom for everyone, including corporate America. The FSF/GNU camp failed the movement over the last couple weeks by refusing to openly and agressively defend it's core principles. The KDE team failed the open source movement, by abandoning the core principle of the GPL, and using it's size and stature in the open source community to start what might well be the last debate of a failed ideal.

Power corrupts, and what we are watching unfold, is that the absolute power being demanding by the KDE team, is almost certainly going to corrupt the open source movement and GPL community absolutely as other ego's seek to grab their share of this new power.

Monday, at dawn I sent a written email request to gnu@gnu.org specifically asking three questions. There has been no answer, which is chilling.

1) From this sites web page, the free software definition includes the specific liberty of NOT having to ask permission to make changes and distribute them. Is the KDE team rightfully acting in the spirit of free software and the GPL licenses by demanding this contract term be ignored and RedHat abandon distribution of modified KDE software?

2) Does the FSF/GNU consider the forking of KDE a legal or moral violation of GPL?

3) Are the KDE teams actions regarding this issue, of publicly attacking RedHat for violating their artistic rights to control KDE's evolution consistant with the position of the FSF and GPL licensing?

For those that have missed the quiet war, please check out http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News& file=article&sid=202 and http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News& file=article&sid=203.

I strongly urge everyone that placed their hopes on FSF/GPL to protect one core right to tinker to let gnu@gnu.org know that they MUST defend the principles they stand for, or watch THEIR movement fail as corporate America (nay that of the world) drop open source and GPL lest they be the next target of corporate bashing.

Here's a snippet from the Microsoft Windows Media Player EULA (added in June with the "Security" update):

"Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ('Secure Content), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer . If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update."

So, in pretty plain English, MS is basically saying we can control what applications you can run on your computer. Oh, and we'll post it in some obscure place on the web for ya. Fun.

The article that I got this from is here.

Sigh...
Please don't trot out the old "OS/2 failed because it emulated Windows apps" argument. This was the least of OS/2's reasons for failing, which you can read about in detail in Linux and Main's brilliant article here

It has been long since I have seen as confusing messaging, this seems almost like a joke. It does not make any sense at all.

There is some evidence that this kind of report is crap. I found real numbers from IBM, Dell and "the new HP", and wrote an article on Linux and Main describing them. From my article:

"Sales of general purpose servers running Linux grew in 2001, to 486,000 units worldwide, while sales of Windows NT and Unix servers declined in the same time period. In 2002, while most parts of the server market shrank, Linux server sales grew 78.9 percent, Gartner said. In March 2002, Linux surpassed NetWare to become the second largest operating system used for new Intel-based server deployments according to IDC.

"Dell reported that in 2001, Linux servers represented 8% to 10% of all servers sold. Randy Groves, vice-president for enterprise computing at Dell said in a recent interview that number should climb to 10% to 12% in 2002. Peter Blackmore, executive vice-president of HP's enterprise systems group and former executive vice-president of sales at Compaq, said in a recent interview that 12% of customers are purchasing Compaq Proliant servers preloaded with Linux. He further indicated the number will move into the high teens through 2002 and 2003. In Linux servers, IBM moved up to the No. 1 spot, improving its sales 19 percent to hold 34.4 percent of the $236 million Linux server market."

I wonder where these numbers indiocating down sales are from, because everything I found indicated that 2001 sales numbers were up and sales of Linux preinstalled on servers is going up further yet.

There is some evidence that this kind of report is crap. I found real numbers from IBM, Dell and "the new HP", and wrote an article on Linux and Main describing them. From my article:

"Sales of general purpose servers running Linux grew in 2001, to 486,000 units worldwide, while sales of Windows NT and Unix servers declined in the same time period. In 2002, while most parts of the server market shrank, Linux server sales grew 78.9 percent, Gartner said. In March 2002, Linux surpassed NetWare to become the second largest operating system used for new Intel-based server deployments according to IDC.

"Dell reported that in 2001, Linux servers represented 8% to 10% of all servers sold. Randy Groves, vice-president for enterprise computing at Dell said in a recent interview that number should climb to 10% to 12% in 2002. Peter Blackmore, executive vice-president of HP's enterprise systems group and former executive vice-president of sales at Compaq, said in a recent interview that 12% of customers are purchasing Compaq Proliant servers preloaded with Linux. He further indicated the number will move into the high teens through 2002 and 2003. In Linux servers, IBM moved up to the No. 1 spot, improving its sales 19 percent to hold 34.4 percent of the $236 million Linux server market."

I wonder where these numbers indiocating down sales are from, because everything I found indicated that 2001 sales numbers were up and sales of Linux preinstalled on servers is going up further yet.

This means that you can archive your entire collection of CDs onto your hard drive at, say 192kbps or something, and then directly derive lower-bitrate versions (say 64kbps) to put on a portable (player, storage device, etc.) without having to re-encode from the originals.

I know, I know, there currently isn't a mass-market portable Ogg player. But most players claim that they are "firmware upgradeable for future audio formats" (or some such language), and the Vorbis guys license a fixed-point Ogg decoder (very useful for portable players), so that functionality is (hopefully) not too far off.

This would involve codnig an integer decoder for vorbis

-Neo

I believe the link you're actually looking for is: http://www.linuxandmain.com/comment/ed040702.html.

I was set to take issue with you, but starting out with "the noted anti-Semite Robert Fisk" lost a lot of points for DEP in my book. (People should read the interview with Fisk in the LA Weekly, and decide for themselves if he's anti-Semitic or not.) Criticizing European developers for being more supportive of socialism than American developers also shows a lack of connection to the rest of the world that's, well, sadly typical. The "socialism = communism = end of democracy" meme over here has been so successful that most Americans can't conceive of the mere possibility that a fully democratic country might support some kinds of socialism. (Suggest to them that the multiparty parliamentary systems most of those "socialist" countries use are, in fact, arguably more democratic than our "winner takes all" nonparliamentary system, and you might as well be speaking Martian.)

I personally wouldn't trust anything written by DEP about KDE. He has been known to go on personally bashing KDE developers and contributors in his articles, instead of presenting real arguments. This seems to be attributed to some kind of an ancient personal hostility DEP has towards the KDE developers, which may be traced back to a political background, no less.

You see, about two months ago, DEP was behind an editorial on Linux And Main that blamed the KDE developers for promoting antisemitism and nazism (!), believe it or not.

Here's an excerpt from that article:

It seemed as if the mystery had finally been solved.

The mystery is what the "K" in KDE stands for. There have been various explanations offered over the years, but nothing has "stuck."

For a time last week, one might have had reason to suppose that "K" was chosen because it is the letter that most resembles a goose-stepping soldier, arm raised in a salute not widely seen since the dark days of the early 1940s.

You can read the whole thing here.

Hundred "lol msnbc rotfl lol" one liners already?

Bashing articles like this takes patience, and (lucky for me) always starts with a little character assasination:

A quick google on Jown w. schoen shows us john (whose lastname translates to "shoe" in dutch btw, for those who where wondering) likes to write stories. None of these apear to be hosted at nasa.gov , so we just assume he is no rocket scientist. Most of his stories come from msnbc And they tell us about how "local busineses go for the gold at the olympics and the Insurance industry thriving post-9/11 . Now, in his favour, google turns up some searches indicating he (or someone with his name) wants to preserve wildlife(bears and birds ), I may be ruthless with other peoples character, but on these issues I agree and think he should perhaps consider a full time career couse he does a way better job at writing about birds then he does on "hightech-biz-hype" issues where he just does the pressrelease/minute counting game to find out whats "hot" (hype)

Righ now is the time to note his stories are not hosted at ADTI, either. Nice for him you might think, couse documents once posted there, tend to change over time, but there is another reason. It seems john has found a platform for his text in wich there is little bother about their contents as long as they match the general small to thinking-they-are-big busineses line of interests. No critical journalism, and no conclusion of any sort in this article whatsoever, by no means a targeted fud compaign.

So what remains of this particular story: "At tech expo, open source software is hard to find" is the sub-headline for those of us who (like me) didn`t bother to read the article completely, thats all what this story is about and it just heapons to be a quote from someone who is in those silent spots at "tech expo". Wich expo is he talking about anyway, ah there is the link in the article, you know a good journalist has done his/her job when you see one link in the article, it tells you that he has listened to every side on the matter on which he (or she) is reporting. Tech expo must be a fun place to be, especially for serious programmer will feel right at home at the informationweek sponsored (another reputable magazine with such high ranking "news sources" as the bsa!) where the most sophistacated topic seams to "securing wireless networks using nice shiny gui software", one has to wonder in what cave those who hear of wireless insecurity for the first time have been living, but it aint the one with our friendly OOG

And now I might have lost the readers looking for a nice conspiracy theory about well targeted fud already, dont throw away those tinfoil hats yet couse msnbc actually reports the scary story that there is an FBI booth at pc expo where real fbi officers (no "I could have sworn it was a booth babe when I asked about getting a picture of her kissing me" stories this time)hand out application forms becouse, acording to msnbc "where better to find certified computer experts" Now that is scary becouse from what I read in the rest of the story, this expo doesn`t really match computex, hacking at large or e3 for that matter, so I think the FBI should have a chat with Cia recruting or perhaps see if the nsa has some cryptographers left couse I have the feeling they wont find any real technical help at this expo (other then those who put ten years of wireless mcse window 2000 experience with webservices .net and iis on their cv).

Microsoft knows what they're doing, and if this thing succeeds, you can forget about any non-Windows operating system being even remotely usable.

Microsoft holds a patent that describes a method by which hardware and software interoperate to guarantee "digital rights management" (aka fair use destruction and monopoly lock-in). The patent describes a mechanism in which there is a private/public key pair, with one half embedded in hardware (possibly the CPU). Only "authorized code" (aka Windows) can run in ring 0 (kernel space) on the CPU. Naturally, only Windows has the other half of the key.

This is probably how the Xbox prevents third-party operating systems from running, and it probably is why they originally applied for the patent. But it also has lots of uses in the monopoly business. This article describes how useful the patent could be in implementing the Hollings bill. Take it one step further and it's easy to envision a world in which this type of "protection" is not only mandated by law... but unimplementable by Linux hackers due to patent problems.

Hopefully, by the time this thing hits critical mass (if ever), Linux will be too firmly entrenched for the industry to allow it to be required. I think we're already there on the server side (1 out of 4 servers sold today ships with Linux, more if you include the ones they can't count). In another couple of years we'll be there on the desktop as well. But as they say, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Let's make sure we get heard.b

The problem is that this means Loki will never really hit mass market.

The problem is that the game market is a novelty market. Lots of companies make games that will be interesting for about a month and then move on. If memory serves, Loki ported games that had already been out for a while.

This question is late but important.

I have read that there have been significant changes in the numbers of OpenLinux developers and many have been sent to other areas or companies as a result of the UnitedLinux effort.

How many Caldera employees are currently involved in developing OpenLinux? How many for UnitedLinux? Are further reductions in staff planned? How many developers were let go? Has Caldera effectively bowed to UnitedLinux?