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Yes! A standard library should b e just fine for an elementary school. Maybe have some computers which should run an educational linux system. http://www.linuxplanet.com/lin... has decent list. Don't bother with electronic gadgets like tablets and ebook readers, the kids will just break them.

If you just need to copy tunes to and from the device on Linux, there are several options that work great. Google search for them, or check your Linux Version Software store/center/repository. Banchee works for me.

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/7204/1

To be fair, the DOJ blocked them from buying sourcefire (the commercial part of Snort) for that very reason in 2006: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6399/1

Or consider getting a *lot* of access points for a mesh and using VOIP for calls. Your neighbors would love you.

If it is indeed for the file system, then it's understandable.

Good guess. I hadn't thought of that.

Now, if by "understandable" you mean "comprehensible," then sure. But how is it reasonable? From the article (by Bruce Perens):

Indeed, the FAT patents have been invalidated for being non-innovative in Germany, and only survived invalidation in the U.S. through a patent office appeal in which opponents were not allowed to participate. It would take a trial in court to finally settle the issue, a trial that Microsoft would likely have lost.

But justice is too expensive. A trial to invalidate the eight patents Microsoft brought against TomTom, none of them poster-boys for innovation, would have cost more than TomTom had to spend, perhaps in excess of $10 million dollars.

Good question.

The 2010 /guesstimate/ is 12 million Ubuntu users. 1 in 12 for "what does this thing do" clicks seems kinda low, considering how visible it is in the file manager.
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/7032/1/

Usage stats are notoriously difficult to get for Ubuntu, and Canonical doesn't reveal methodology. However even without tying to IP, one ought to be able to get a pretty good guesstimate of use based on repository stats. Ought to be good for within +- a million at least. So provisionally let's say 12 million isn't a garbage figure.

Writing a license and knowing exactly how a court of law will interpret that license are two entirely different things. We now may know the intent of the license, but until it's tested in court, that intent means nothing.

Here, let me fix that for you ...

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/24/1316220/GPL-Wins-In-French-Court-Case

"An appeals court in Paris has upheld the ruling from a lower court, which found that the French firm Edu4 had violated the GNU General Public License (GPL). The plaintiff was the French Organisation Association francaise pour la Formation Professionnelle des Adultes (AFPA), an umbrella organization for adult education."

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/7145/1/

In December 2009, the Software Freedom Conservancy filed lawsuits against 14 consumer electronics vendors alleging that they were not in compliance with the GPL license. Of those 14 vendors, 13 have now either settled amicably or are in productive discussions toward a settlement.

In one case, consumer electronics vendor Westinghouse failed to comply, and a U.S. District Court has now ruled in a default judgment against it.

http://gpl-violations.org/news/20060922-dlink-judgement_frankfurt.html

gpl-violations.org project prevails in court case on GPL violation by D-Link

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DISTRICT COURT OF FRANKFURT ISSUES VERDICT ON GPL VIOLATION OF D-LINK

BERLIN, Germany - September 22, 2006 -- The gpl-violations.org project prevails
in court litigation against D-Link Germany GmbH regarding D-Link's alleged
inappropriate and copyright infringing use of parts of the Linux Operating
System Kernel.
...
On September 6, 2006 the district court issued its judgement, confirming the
claims by gpl-violations.org, specifically its rights on the subject-matter
source code, the violation of the GNU GPL by D-Link, the validity of the GPL
under German law, and D-Links obligation to reimburse gpl-violations.org for
legal expenses, test purchase and cost of re-engineering.

http://www.fsf.org/news/wallace-vs-fsf

The GPL tested in US courts - Wallace Vs FSF.
by Matt Lee — last modified March 23, 2006 18:34

The GNU General Public License stands firm.
On Monday March 20, 2006 US Federal Judge John Daniel Tinder, dismissed the Sherman Act antitrust claims brought against the Free Software Foundation. The claims made by Plaintiff Daniel Wallace included: that the General Public License (GPL) constituted a contract, combination or conspiracy; that it created an unreasonable restraint of trade; and that the FSF conspired with IBM, Red Hat Inc., Novell and other individuals to pool and cross-license their copyrighted intellectual property in a predatory price fixing schem

Administer? No. Debug? Yep! http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/7295/1/

I don't run vim if it's not part of the OS. I run /usr/bin/vi because it's part of the OS. On Linux it might be vim. On BSD it might be nvi, on Solaris it's vi.

Real Unix vets know how to use the tools that came with the OS and don't *have* to use extra stuff. But we'll use nmap if we have it. Or emacs.

FWIW, you can use echo * when ls isn't available.

Microsoft has its own axe to grind vs Flash - Silverlight.

True, and possibly having it's own upper hand with Microsoft OK'ing Moonlight (the open source version being made by Novell). This brings Silverlight to all 3 major OS's. If Silverlight and Moonlight can out preform Flash on all 3 and then port both properly to Windows Mobile, iPhone and Android phones it would be a major game changer.

$650 for a laptop that most likely vendor locks you in to hardware that will only run Windows. You just can not be sure if you do not purchase from a Linux Vendor.

I checked on Pricegrabber.com for that model of laptop, it was $100 more from one vendor and $200 dollars more from another vendor...not that, that matters as if the hardware is designed for Windows, it might not run with Linux. Maybe it will, maybe it will not.

The only way to be sure is to purchase from a Linux vendor and buy Windows separately, even if it costs you $130 - $200 for that copy of Windows. Personally I do not think Windows is worth that, but that is only my opinion.

As for the Linux laptops being twice as much, you are being misleading and you know it.

ZaReason: $349 (10.2"); $699 (14"); $699 (15.4", out of stock); $799 (14"); $899 (12" out of stock); $1299 (15" out of stock)

System 76: $359 (10.1"); $789 (12.1); $879 (13"); $769 (14"); $779 (15.6"); $1299 (15.6")

In both cases, with both companies, only one of the many options was priced at $1299 ("when prices are like double").

Note none of the Linux options have larger than 15" monitors...I hook my 10" Asus Eee PC to my 22" monitor when at home anyway and use a 4 port switcher to switch between my netbook, desktop or two servers (internal at home use only) so I would not pay extra for a larger monitor anyway. I know I am in the minority there. And when I travel, I only take the Asus Eee PC, works great for what I need to do when I am traveling and does not require an extra case for the nickel-dime charges with the Airlines. A HUGE plus!

The only point is vendor lock in, if you buy Windows pre-Installed you might be prevented in running Linux. If you buy Linux pre-Installed; you can always run Windows.

Vendor Lock-in stiffles innovation and has for over a decade now, aren't you tired of this crap yet? Its been over 20 years for me and I am so over the vendor lock-in crapola!

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6801/1/

Perhaps there are some technical details I'm missing as I'm not a .NET developer. But I believe in principal that since the EU demanded that Microsoft work on interoperability, if Microsoft was sucking people into a patent trap here to sue them, that the EU would just jump all over them.

And while Microsoft has taken a number of anti-competitive measures, and assembled a wealthy patent portfolio, I'm not aware of a single case of Microsoft suing anyone over a patent yet. Though, Ballmer's threat that every business running Linux could be sued was a pretty shady tactic.

I'm not trying to troll here. It certainly looks more polished than the train wreck that 4.1 and 4.2 was

If you aren't trying to troll, then you must be trying to be serious, but...I have to ask anyway...are you joking? I seem to remember KDE 4.2 being hailed as relatively stable when it was released, worlds better than 4.0 or 4.1. What happened to that?

Citations needed and provided:
http://www.osnews.com/story/20857/KDE_4_2_Released_Short_Interview_Aaron_Seigo/page2/
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6655/1/

And this one is a little more negative, but still along some of the same positive lines as the other two:
http://www.linux-ninja.com/2009/02/07/kde-42-review/

So...um...if I may ask...how was KDE 4.2 a "train wreck", as you put it? Are you sure you aren't trying to troll?

FYI, even if you use your own key, Mozy only encrypts the contents, not the filenames. That's rather insufficient. A court could subpoena them for a list of your files, establish that particular files exists, and require you to produce them. See http://michaelshadle.com/2007/05/07/mozy-the-backup-client-damn-close-but-still-no-cigar/

Plug: In 2006 I founded https://spideroak.com/ specifically to provide a zero-knowledge approach to online backups. We don't know anything about your data, including your file and foldernames. On the servers we just see sequentially numbered data blocks. It's written in Python and C and we've always supported Linux and OS X (and Windows if that's what you're into.) SpiderOak keeps historical versions of your files and deleted files forever (or until you decide to remove them) and will sync folders for you across several computers. Some reviews are http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6644/1/ and http://www.maclife.com/article/reviews/online_storage_battle_which_cloud_backup_service_reigns_supreme

The idea is very old, and contrary to the article there are plenty of people offering similar services: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Rent-Your-Own-Supercomputer-for-2-77-per-Hour-82166.shtml, http://www.hoise.com/primeur/00/articles/weekly/AE-PR-04-00-20.html, http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4590/2/, etc.

Is their offering cheaper? Unfortunately the article didn't tell us.

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?

Provided that your motherboard and peripheral makers aren't bought-and-paid-for by Microsoft, yes. It's possible to use some drivers from the Windows XP world on Linux/x86, such as ndiswrapper drivers, but it's also possible to replace your peripherals with ones that have native Linux drivers.

If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows.

I've owned two Macs; neither ran Windows. I currently own an ASUS Eee PC; it came with Linux, and it still runs Linux. And Dell is selling PCs with Ubuntu Desktop on them.

it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve.

Hundreds of thousands of people have developed and tested free software for the various GNU/Linux distributions, from college students in their spare time to full-time professionals. If, on average, they put in the purchasing-power-parity equivalent of $10,000 of their time, there are your billions right there. Linux alone is worth $1.4 billion, and that's just the kernel. The same article values the whole Fedora distro at over $10 billion.

Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.

Intel yes; Microsoft no. It's possible to install Windows alongside Mac OS X on a Mac with an Intel CPU, but Mac OS X out of the box draws far more from NeXTstep and FreeBSD than from Windows.

So, Linux deserves most of the resources for defending against patent trolls.

Here, again, we see the steady hand of IBM. It has been the central company in bringing Linux into the mainstream.

Before IBM announced its decision to deploy Linux on IBM servers, Linux was just a niche application used by brilliant scientists and engineers. In 2000, IBM changed the computing landscape by officially supporting Linux and deploying it across its entire range of servers. If IBM backed Linux, then the business community would try it. IBM was willing to sign contracts guaranteeing the reliability of Linux.

Linux is now the only Unix-ish operating system in many financial and engineering firms.

Given the number of "is Linux ready for the desktop?" discussion threads, I'm pretty glad they don't follow your advice on releases.

Depending on who you ask, a project as complicated and large as a Linux distribution release might never be ready. Hence periodic release dates, which seem to be working just fine for Ubuntu.

Last I looked Ubuntu is based on Debian, so your example is actually a counter-example of what you want to prove. Debian has a philosophy of "release it when it's ready" that hasn't, afaict, changed. That's why Ubuntu, ertc., base themselves on Debian. Less of a moving target, etc.

You can find out how I got my Debian desktop running with suspend / hibernate here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

And thanks for posting, I thought I had "cool and quiet" running on my x2/4200, turns out all I've done was turn the capability on in BIOS, for more information on turning it on (Debian/Ubuntu), try this article.

You can find out how I got my Debian desktop running with suspend / hibernate here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

And thanks for posting, I thought I had "cool and quiet" running on my x2/4200, turns out all I've done was turn the capability on in BIOS, for more information on turning it on (Debian/Ubuntu), try this article.

mysticgoat wrote:

In my experience, OOo does a good job of reading MS formats in the general case. When it fails, there seem to be only two causes:

1. The original document was absurdly complex. Yesterday's "power users" were encouraged to use features of MS Word and Excel that belong to desk top publishing. They were also encouraged to devise macros without any training in programming practices. Through the experiences gained in dealing with these older documents, institutions have learned what should NOT be done in a word processor or spreadsheet, but if an old document looks okay superficially, no one is going to check it for flaws.

2. The underlying logic of the original document was broken. In MS Word, there are half a dozen different ways to achieve a similar appearance; eg, half a dozen ways to indent a block of text or create an ordered list. Many older documents will jump between these different ways, and get away with it because they just happen to generate a similar appearance in that version of the software.

As a general rule, if OOo fails to render an MS document correctly, there are subsurface flaws in that document that need to be corrected. If I were teaching an MS Office Applications course again, I would instill in students the habit of running their final drafts through OOo as part of their final check. Any well written document should have an acceptable appearance in OOo as well as in Office. If it doesn't, then the hidden syntax is wrong for the intended semantics, and that needs to be corrected.

Here is a link to an article from 2001 on LinuxPlanet that I read which concerns OpenOffice's filters for MS Word documents which relates to the above issues: http://linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/3857/1/.

The author is misinformed in other fronts and contradicts himself in several points. He points at the 25 years of bureaucracy to develop the F-22, but follows up with a comment on the 60-day lifecycle to develop "Hellfire missiles" (which I think is the infamous "Bunker Busters", but I'm too lazy to fact check myself).

He also talks about scaling back the F-22 from 750 orders to about 200 (which is true), but ignores the current plan to acquire thousands of superior F-35 aircraft (third paragraph) over the next 2 decades.

And he completely ignores the robustness of the advanced technology that we deploy. UAVs and PackBots are expensive diversions that force the guerrillas to fight a continually more complex war. As a result, less people die... which is one of the main goals, is it not? But because it is robust, it is saved the trouble of being completely changed after the opposition adapts. That is to say, the enemy switches from one disposable prototype to another... but we are left with the technology to stop both types of the low-tech devices. We evolve, they just swap in different components using mix-and-match "recipes" (which were discussed in the author's article to be faulty 75-80% of the time).

The other thing that ticked me off that the author missed completely was the complete absence of a mention towards the DoD's desire to embrace Open Source and the mention that recent contracts enforce "GPR" license mechanisms to promote Joint Reuse across the military development network of contractors (and for the uninformed, GPR [government purpose rights] is the DoD equivalent of GPL [general purpose license] with built in (obvious) restrictions that would apply to work done that is sensitive to the nations interest).

In any case, I still found the article to be well written with some intelligent discussion and it is definitely worthy of some consideration in respect to steering the interests of what is good for the world and how to successfully fight a guerrilla war.

Commercial or homebrew NAS is a reasonable network solution.

If you're just backing up a single workstation, get either another HD of the same make/model or a pair of something else, put the second drive in a mobile rack (mine is for SATA, they also have these for IDE as well), and run that drive as a bootable drive mirror. This solution cost me $22.99 + S/H over the cost of the HD, and I recommend it (with software that works on your OS) to everyone who is backing up a single machine.

Remove the tray with the HD in it and put it somewhere else when it's not being actively used in backup. If the main drive packs it in, make sure there isn't a hard drive-eating problem, then plug in the backup and boot.

I use an rsync script running off a customized Knoppix disk on my Linux box, I'm not sure what one would use in Windows these days.

I can say that my backup solution has saved my ass more than once. I also back up to DVD+R archives, but thankfully, I've only had to test bare-metal restores, my backup mirror has made it unnecessary for me to actually use them.

It's not about repeating the "party line" (to be honest, I don't think there is one), I'm not really a Wine developer either (although I've had 2 small patches committed), I'm just presenting the situation the way I see it.

Currently I can't say: function x, it gets executed by Acrobat Reader 2.1, Firefox, fuzzycalc and Darly's Printshop. So the person who implements it can test it with these applications that make use of it.

Strictly speaking, you're right, but that data is fairly easily accessable. For example, here's a tiny script that'll give you said information (just feed it a +relay trace), I just wrote it in the span of a few minutes. It could be useful to integrate such data with the AppDB.

I understand that a function does not need to be 100% implemented. But think about a sponsor who says: I want to sponsor dll x. Or: My program WAccounting uses these 5 API calls, I want this program to run perfect under Wine, what does it cost me?

In general, people don't seem to care about how much of a DLL is implemented, they care about if their programs foo, baz and bar work. Most of the major investments into Wine have been to make a particular program (or set of programs) work, such as Google with Picasa (list of patches), or Corel with Wordperfect and CorelDRAW (until Microsoft threw a large chunk of money at them).

In a similar vein, Codeweavers offers porting services for Wine, ie, they'll make a particular application work, and they can give you an estimate of how much it'll cost, on a case by case basis.

What also motivates people is to see a kind of progress bar. I mean a automated script that indicates how much stubs and so on are in there.

I agree that people like progress bars (so do I), but they can be deceptive. For example, the Wine status pages have an automated script that guesses the completion status of all DLLs based on the contents of the .spec file for each DLL, but this isn't always accurate. For example, the .spec files don't seem to contain all functions for a given DLL, (I'd guess any COM functions aren't in there, as they're special, AFAIK), and while the automated tool thinks that d3d8 and d3d9 are 40% and 20% completed, respectively, the actual case is closer to 95% in both cases, based upon developer inspection.

I also would like to get informed how to debug an application with Wine. The documentation is heavily outdated and imcomplete here. WINEDEBUG=+relay is intresting, I tried it out. But the documentation is not very informative here.

Here's the complete list of WINEDEBUG channels, as well as some useful registry keys, and a debugging tutorial. Generally when you're debugging something, WINEDEBUG can be very useful with the right channels selected.

My perception is that we will get
- almost perfect DirectX games support
- very good installer and crypto support.
because here it really does scale but wine development did not scale that much over the past years.

Actually, as I menti

Even advancements in multi-core technology would not require a 3.x series kernel (unless I'm mistaken in my belief that the 2.6.x series supports multi-core CPU's), simply because once you cam make a dual-core CPU functional with the kernel, expanding that functionality to 4, 8, or even 64 cores is simply an expanding of the current code. And even if the current kernel does not support multi-core CPU's, that would be more of a 2.8.x series, rather than an entirely new kernel version.

Has this got anything to do with the BBC's two-billion-GBP computer outsourcing deal with Siemens? Way back in 1999 the BBC had its own Linux-savvy wizards who did a fantastic job on the BBC website and other tasks:

http://linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/1176/1/

I'd like to thank them for making sure the BBC's watch/listen pages work on my GNU/Linux/Mozilla/Realplayer computer at home. Now, it's all gone to Siemens, apparently:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2004/10/01/ 205660/bbc-completes-2bn-outsourcing-deal-with-sie mens.htm

Anyone inside BBC or Siemens care to comment?

It's not like either Oracle or RedHat are Monsanto or something. Both have done massive contributions and offer a distro of Linux.

it looks to me that Oracle did a massive "me too". a bad one. so now people left and right are pissed off. fucking surprising.

Should Linux and Mac sales have also doubled?

Um they have, but in the last couple months, not over 6 years ago sales figures..

Mac sales... From the financual page..
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AAPL&annual

Income Sept 30 2006 19,315,000 All numbers in thousands.
Income Sept 24 2005 13,931,000
Income Sept 25 2004 8,279,000

In two years from 2004 to 2006 the income went from 8 Billion to 19 Billion. It's not all iPod and iTunes sales.

Picking just one Lunux distro which is popular..
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2276320

Since there isn't any real sales figures, I thought I would go to see if the online chatter is increasing. The Ubuntu forum is growing rapidly. "We register over 14,000 new accounts each month"

If you want a pretty graph of Linux installed base from 2000-2006, take a look here.
http://linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6065/1/ screenshot3524/

A casual glance seems to indicate more than a doubling of the 2000 installed base figure.

Here is what a market analist has to say;
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS2014 7206

"IDC offers the following recommendations for services providers:

Open source will become business as usual in two to three years, so act today and create direct open source services offerings and embed open source in your solutions where you can"

and

"The study also reveals that open source is moving up on the investment agenda of companies worldwide, as services providers (mostly services arms of technology companies) have formalized support, training, and certification services to encourage adoption of open source (principally Linux) on their products. As open source software goes mainstream, IDC finds that services vendors must further develop open source capabilities in order to meet their clients' needs and attract new customers."

Anonymous Coward wrote and included with a post:

OpenOffice and KWord import and export from Microsoft Office format.

Imperfectly. Microsoft have a better track record (though not perfect) with writing software that can understand Word documents.

One of the problems with trying to write a program that can accurately read and write MS Word files is the way that information is stored in an MS Word file. The article "In Depth With StarOffice Filters" by Brian Proffitt http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/385 7/1/ lists the difficulties in creating a filter for MS Word files.

What extra features do you get from the new MS search compared to the old and how does it compare to the user unfriendly find and grep on cygwin or *nix?

Have a look at this article: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/436 1/1/ then choose amongst the more mature projects: Coda http://coda.cs.cmu.edu/ and OpenAFS http://www.openafs.org/. Intermezzo looked promising but hasn't been updated in a long while so it's probably dead.

Hope this helps.

Hmmmm. So you would never expect Oracle to THINK up a network computer? And since they are just a DB company, they would never branch out to doing business software, as well? And this must be true because ellis and Gates are SUCH good friends.

Ellis did the Think to get mindshare. Overall it lost money, but Ellis will tell you that it did make Oracle better known. Likewise, the buying of peoplesoft/jdedwards helped sales of the DB. If they can get Oracle OS out there and get themselves known as being an easy to use AND solid OS, it propogates throughout. In fact, there are some interesting marketing that they could do cheaply to gut MS's sql server.

A while ago I compared the number of dependencies to other components between Mozilla and the Internet Explorer. I thought that the free availability of many open source components would result in a much large number of dependencies (and therefore complexity) in Mozilla than in the IE. It turned out that the opposite was true. One explanation could be that, because Microsoft isn't obliged to publish the interfaces of internal Windows components and maintain backward compatibility, Microsoft developers have an easier time in creating internally reusable Windows components. Of course, in the long term, this strategy will backfire, as demonstrated by the travails of the Windows Vista release.

There is a review of it back in 2000: "Rather well, as it ends up: better than any Linux to date, including Red Hat Linux." I personally never heard of it back then or since then.

Does none remember that Corel was bought by Microsoft? Does Microsoft not have a controlling-interest in Corel process and operations? So they dropped their Linux offers and claim to have regained value, yet have not the common courtesy to refer to Linux as a service-oriented technology? Sure Linux is a liability if the company doesn't use it for a profitable purpose. Business-101 isn't what Corel needs, because it is evident propoganda Microsoft directs through its subsidiaries it buys into. This is no different than how Microsoft inducted SCO to harass and issue false titles and false claim to Intellectual Property owners in competition.

"Microsoft Office has built-in .. such as voice synthesizers, special screen readers and enlargers,"

Technically speaking such support is a function of the OS and as such is transparient to the application. As for 'OpenDocument-based products do not yet` this is also inaccurate. Makes one wonders just where he is getting his fastfacts from?

The Gnopernicus project .. allow low-vision and blind users access to standard .. applications via speech and braille output ..

Why a Windows-Only Argument Is A Bad Idea

Open Source Accessibility

I remember a time when Linux and Mozilla on an older system would breathe new life into it.

Ignoring your point about Linux distributions and concentrating solely on Mozilla, I would like to say, 'bullshit'. IIRC, it ran horribly when I first tried it out, and look! Now that I've googled for reviews of Netscape 6 and Mozilla 1.0, my memory is confirmed!

annoyingly slow and a resource hog

it is noticeably sluggish unless you are using a fairly fast computer with ample RAM

So maybe you just used to buy new hardware more often?

Are they related to Microsoft ENTerprise Operating System?

No, CentOS is actually a totally free equivalent of RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL for people who don't have the money to spend on an RHEL license).

There are several accounting packages for Linux. GnuCash is a highly competent package that seems to do everything Quickbooks does, and easily surpasses Quicken. If there is something that it does not do yet, then tell the developers and they will add it.

Hardware VS Software Raid

The $13 card you purchased is software Raid. Promise cards are mostly hardware RAID. I recently purchased a Promise FastTrack S150 SX4-M for less than $100 hardware RAID5 card compared to the $30-50 software RAID5 cards. I'm pretty satisified with the purchase but unfortunately there isn't room for much upgrade. I currently have 4x160GB in a RAID5 configuration giving me 480GB of space and 1 disc of redundnacy.

Some useful links to tell you the difference between software raid and hardware raid are:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/conf/ctrl Hardware-c.html
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Man ual/custom-guide/s1-raid-approaches.html
http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-10880_11-5715216. html
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/4 349/2/

Well, it is actually possible to achieve anti-aliased rendering on Linux (not without some effort): http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/3 093/1/

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/607 8/1/

Getting the Real Facts: How Industry Analyst Reports Can Trick Readers

Microsoft's "Get the Facts" advertising campaign makes the claim that Windows offers a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than Linux, and backs it up with reports from well-known industry analyst firms. But Linux advocates claim that the TCO of Linux is lower, and some other studies back them up. How can you separate the fact from the fiction?

This is based on my book, The Practical Manager's Guide to Open Source: http://windows-linux.com/practicalOpenSource, which analyzes several of the studies in detail.

For those who don't remember the old IBM advertising campaign.

true, it doesn't quite come up to the standard that corporates expect but then again, not many do. as for something that no company would use, the BBC mux their teletext (strange UK info service through your TV) into their broadcast signal with Slack (http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/11 76/1/) regarding support, yeah, you have a good point, although Pat has taken steps to ensure that, in his absence, Slack will continue. i think his way of doing things is actually infectious and is influencing the way Slack users think about their OS. i would expect the project to continue, even without him.

Seems to be in preliminary conceptual stages, but KDE is having ambitious plans for these kind of things in KDE 4 with Tenor http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/581 6/1/ http://dot.kde.org/1113428593/ http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005/04/tenor-for-devel opers.html

...RPMdrake to me.

BTW, that screenshot is eleven generations old now. The new ones are even better, but I wanted to make the point that Linux has had this facility since more than a year before OS X was even released.

If you want a piece of software which has not been diskimaged, you need to go through exactly the same rigmarole you posit for Linux, but without URPMI or apt-get or YAST or yum or whatever to help you find dependencies.

Unless you're after something from Fink - a third-party effort which exists because...? Anyone...? [distant chorus: Apple's packaging is deficient]

Same story for Wintendo, of course, only there ain't no WinFink (although CygWin is close) and it don't come with no useful build system at all 'coz Microsoft are really only interested in having dependants, not partners.

The implication behind the diskimage install is that either the Apple apps have no dependencies (interesting concept), or everything gets shipped statically linked. Do your DMGs automatically upgrade with the rest of your system?

• http://press.nokia.com/PR/199908/776321_5.html
• http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=7 86
• http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/newss/977/1 /screenshot698/

• http://press.nokia.com/PR/200009/790116_5.html
• http://slashdot.org/articles/01/01/18/0327252.shtm l
• http://slashdot.org/articles/01/05/16/1330236.shtm l

If you confuse Contextual Linkage engine with "Trappist Westvleteren 12 (Yellow Cap)", which is a type of beer, you're either way too drunk or very extremely not drunk, so much so you've gone through the other side and have emerged into drunkeness.

I think you were trying to point here.

From here:

"IDC's numbers don't include free downloads or copies made and passed along to other users, nor does it include pirated copies of [operating systems] since these types of distributions would be impossible to count."

And that's just for Mac OS X. I imagine that the Linux numbers are much harder to count considering most of us who use Linux download them via BotTorrents or Linux P2P apps or ISOlation files.

Well, it's obviously difficult to get desktop numbers, but of commercial offerings, IDC predicts about 16 percent growth over the next couple of years.

If you look at stats from w3schools.com, Linux hits increased from 2.2 percent to 3.2 percent over the past two years which is a 45% increase.

Five years ago, there wasn't a single UK Linux magazine, now there are three.

I think these suggest that it's growing fairly rapidly.

When Gnome was founded and Miguel was active QT had a "free for non commercial use" license. More importantly KDE had a license which was self contradictory. I quote Miquel source of quote

Q - What about the new Qt license?

A - "I'm very happy that they decided to GPL it," said Miguel, who is also on the board of the FSF. "It can only be considered a win for free software. So all in all, it's a big thing.