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LinuxToday has a link to a C|Net article which says the same thing (verbatim).
The discussion in the LinuxToday forum has probably everything that'll be said here.
One item that stuck out was that MS would not be charging for client licenses. As Tim Wasson pointed out, client licenses are a good revenue source, and MS probably cut a deal with Maxtor so that MS could say "Hey, even with Linux/BSD available, major companies are still choosing our software."
Looks like MS has realized (on some level) that they can't get away with their current pricing scheme.

Here's a more direct link for those who don't want to follow the yafla link (which is a story on the ".COM stock collapse which is how that is relevant).

http://linuxtoday.com/stories/13512.html

"Alarm bells first rang when it emerged last October that Corel's mystery investor was none other than Microsoft. They should have rung louder... Now it appears the United States Department of Justice is taking a closer look at the antitrust implications of that transaction."

"To be brutally honest, I'm not going to shed any tears over the death of Corel's Linux distribution... On the other hand the passing of WordPerfect for Linux and WordPerfect Office for Linux would be more of a worry. Officially these products have not yet been dumped - but don't hold your breath."

"But there's another reason to worry about the demise of Corel's Linux offering, the company has played a major role in the development of Wine. In January Corel outlined its business plan in a press release. Wine isn't specifically mentioned, but the company says it will continue to develop Linux applications and presumably this means the Wine contribution will continue. This means that a Microsoft controlled company is going to play a major role in the development of Wine. Is anyone looking at the antitrust implications of that?"

But MS ..., each day one of its' minions goes and does something that just irritates the hell out of me.

I'm going to have to start painting MS in the pictures of royalist France or something. Or maybe Napoleon. They are really starting to irritate me.

Motorola's on to an interesting marketing gimmick enforcement mechanism. But what about the legal/contract law implications?

For example, If I buy a CD player, will I be required to agree to a license? If I don't agree and the device suicides, will I be able to sue the manufacturer, the distributor, or the retailer? After all, if I buy the device at the local Circuit City but the sales clerk didn't point out the agreement to me, or I bought the device on the gray market, I shouldn't be bound by the terms of the license, should I?

This looks like one more insidious possibility of UCITA shrink-wrap licenses causing grief in the marketplace.

Don't forget to read the unbiased news about UCITA, also (Not that Stallman's opinion doesn't explain enough...).

I wrote about some of this awhile back:

Microsoft and the Art of War

It raises some interesting questions.
__ __ ____ _ ______
\ V .V / _` (_-&#60_-&#60
.\_/\_/\__,_/__/__/

Is Microsoft Astro-Turfing Linux Today?

Would you expect any less from Microsoft

This has been updated, and confirmed, however it looks like the extent of this restructuring is a bit more than just one layoff. Although only one employee has been laid off, "some employees are being moved to a different office" according to the SuSE's press contact.
Check out above article (for the update), or go straight to LWN for the other side of the story, where supposedly 'the number of affected people is said to be "around a couple dozen."'
Linux Weekly News's coverage is woefully short, but there is an e-mail from a SuSE employee on the SuSE mailing list posted as "confirmation"...

Linuxtoday contacted SuSE. They said, this is a total rumour. They've only let ONE person go.

Sigh.

He thinks it's a good idea, but he points out several key issues that differentiate free hardware from free software.

Dont get me wrong- I would love to see the day when a consumer technology from another country actually made an impact back here. Especially ones that would help to allow fair use- not to restrict it.

And the scare story is needed. We've got to get up to support open-source hardware- software alone is not enough. DVD has already become the next VHS- the blockbuster near where I live is already at 50% DVD. And DVD is full of (weak but extant) rights resticting tech that your are legally resticted from trivially bypassing.

You dont want to wait until content pretection logic from a proprietary corp is legally required in all multimedia capable devices do you?

Thats not the only thing you got wrong. Borland is not greedy, they are VERY VERY generous. See this story on LinuxWord.

Do your homework. It's going for FREE in mid 2001. http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-01 -31-001-27-OP-CY-SW Borland is not M$. They want to make money but they care and listen to their customers.

The FREE version is scheduled for mid 2001. See this story on LinuxToday.

According to eweek (printed version, hence no link), the promise of releasing Kylix has boosted their stock by 35% (Symbol will change to BORL).
Also, they are promising three different versions. A 'server' version, a 'desktop' version, and a free version, that will include GPL'ed versions of the libraries, therby forcing you to write GPL'ed software with it. Sounds pretty decent to me.
(For more information, check out this editorial on the subject at Linux Today.)

If you aren't going to be Open Source, it had better be software so special that you don't have competition, or an Open Source project might come along and eat your lunch. This means your product should probably be in a vertical market, not something everybody needs, or something that really does not work in the Open Source model (like TurboTax).

Now there's a sales pitch to the software industry currently considering whether to provide software for the Linux desktop.

Is the community really hellbent on recreating or borging ("your code will be assimilated") most everything above the platform (operating system) services? Doesn't such mentality lead to the software industry (the one besides Open Source consulting services) staying away from Linux in droves?

As I see it, Linux is great as an enabling platform, but although often enthusiastic initially, many (if not most) Open Source projects aren't actually very successful in providing good end-user experiences (e.g. support or continuity). What already scratches a geek itch may leave your average end-user completely in the dark.

It's ironic that your pitch is exactly what Microsoft wants to hear and what the flame-kiddies have been saying all along; that Linux is no place for a thriving commercial marketplace, especially for the masses.

Sure, this limits how much money you can make selling Linux software. We like it that way, and we are getting all of the software that we need, thank you.

In any case, you certainly aren't speaking for me.
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A. Bullard

There's an update on linuxtoday.com, saying that this is actually the result of a DoS attack. Which they call a "break-in." Well, at least they make the cracker/hacker distinction I suppose. And they mention the odd entries in a whois of microsoft.com again too. Apparently all of Microsoft's DNS servers are located on the same network (according to the article), making them more vulnerable to DoS attacks.

OpenNMS. Read the latest update on it here: http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-01 -10-005-04-OS-SW

When a while ago we approached an accountant with our business plan for an online health site (not the site linked in teh .sig below) he asked us to consider micropayments as an alternative to the revenue models we had proposed (ie. instead of subscriptions and advertisements and the-like).

The concept of micropayments is really old - Newspapers have been working along the same principle for ages (sell many, cheap - read Terry Pratchett's "Truth" =)). No-one is handling it in the transparent, single click (uh oh, Amazon =)) way he mentioned due to the problems with security. We probably need a form of PKI infrastructure that could identify us for - but in a way that the privacy is retained. And more then likely that would need to be free/cheap to gain a large following.

Companies like pay-pal are doing ok but when I remember the hoops I had to jump though to buy The Satori Effect (A good read btw) it was everything but transparent, certainly not single click (not David Pesci's fault - PayPals).

It would be interesting to hear from those guys and compare for example David Pesci's experience to the "Ad powered" ones like userfriendly and (my favourite "site support" comic) helpdex
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Linus at Linux Today on the gcc-2.96 compiler is much more interesting than this ZDNet story.

Hello,

I've put up an update of my latest "Wonderful World of Linux 2.4" document. (The final one, natch.) It contains a relatively complete list of new features in this release, sans driver updates and things that I either ignored or didn't know about. Right now, it's on LinuxToday http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-01 -05-007-04-NW-LF-KN, but it may also be elsewhere.

2.6, here we come!

Joe

The best thing about the article on LinuxToday (linked by the /. article) is that applauds (through the changelog) "Linus AND all the rest of the guys who made it happen."

Thankyou to ALL CONTRIBUTORS!!

I cannot believe that the above post, which was a reproduction of Linus's email to the kernel list, was tagged as flamebait. In case the moderator didn't know this, this is Linus's actual email, which you can find off of this Linux Today article.

If this happens to attract flames, it because the flamers are ignorant, and not because the poster is baiting for flames.

In other words, please moderate the parent to this post back up. Thank you.

ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.

Ok ... ... ... Done: Kernal 2.4.0 is out!!!!!

I was reading an article on LinuxToday about SQL and DELETE and went to click on a related link listed below the story: O'Reilly Network: AboutSQL: Filtering SELECTed Data with WHERE(Nov 11, 2000) . The link took me to the same article about data storage.

My guess is that the story probably was there before some piece of code went bad. Interesting use of a 404 error.

LeTaco didn't check the link before posting?
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But no pages on Linux Today at all? (search for freetype resulted in 4 old hits)
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Can be found on Linux Today here. It includes an explanation of what's changed since 2.4.0-test12, what to expect for the immediate future, and a Happy New Year!

When asked by a reporter why Sun's new clustering software was restricted to Solaris and not available on Linux, McNealy's aggravation seemed to peak. "You people just don't get it, do you? All Linux applications run on Solaris, which is our implementation of Linux."

Sorry, that link should have been...
BW: Red Hat Linux Powers Google's Award-Winning Search Engine

The one disturbing thing I found about the letter was the paragraph where he talks about not competing with GNOME.

Well, what I always tend to hear in these letters is the glorification of their system. It is so easy to use and so fun to code for and the technology is so amazing and we have so-and-so many users and ... It goes on and on through the text, between the lines.

The point you make seems to me like just that, nobly denying competition against their main OSS-enemy.. (Of course, that's the way it should be..)

Of course, it's the same on both sides, like RMS's reply to the GPL-ification of QT.

It just strikes me more in KDE letters as I'm a user of GNOME, but I guess KDE users notice it in all GNOME posts too.

Here is a good HOWTO on how to provide exchange "features" to an open system using Sendmail/Cyrus
http://www.moongroup .co m/old/docs/exchange-replacement-howto/

And here is a different example, even including scheduling
http://linuxtoday.com/stories/11031.html& lt;/A>

While I certainly wouldn't knock the impressive nature of hacking an ISA NIC onto a proprietary bus, there have been a few articles recently on setting up a TiVo to connect to a Linux PPP server behind a cable modem or your broadband of choice, which isn't a difficult thing to accomplish. This was discussed recently discussed in a Slashdot article, and also make sure to check out the TiVo forum here. Lastly, be sure to check out LinuxToday, as there have been a few articles recently on this same topic.

The Linux 2.4 todo list can be found here, and an article detailing the new features of 2.4 is here.

Recent reports have shown that the US market for PC's is at least beginning to saturate (it hasn't actually saturated). This will slow sales in the US market.

Except for a handful of small wealthier nations (e.g., Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) most second and third world countries are too poor per capita to pay the high prices for American commercial software. The software police will never be able to keep up with the amount of piracy in these countries.

The one remaining affluent market that is not yet saturating is Europe, but as a whole Europeans are much more open to free alternatives to expensive commercial software.

As a result of this, I think we will be seeing much more of the Microsoft police in the future as Microsoft and other large software vendors attempt to replace the lost revenue. Even our company has received Microsoft/BSA letter and we only have a few hundred employees.

Sounds strange? Think about the following reasons. We've seen many times previously that MSFT avoids admitting their own mistakes for as long as they possibly can. It takes them awhile to warn the public about known bugs or exploits in their various software products. Yet, in this case of the stolen source, they were seemingly very willing to let the press know about the break-in and apparent theft of the source code.

Now that it is public knowledge that some MSFT source code has been stolen, imagine what it does for free/open-source development. Because of this, the FSF and other maintainers of free/OSS software now have to take extra measures to ensure that the code is free of any potential influence of the supposed 'stolen code'. This takes time, effort, and will generally serve to slow-down the development open-source software projects. A big 'plus' for MSFT.

Also, suppose someone posts snippets of the 'Forbidden Source' to various newsgroups, like the public postings of DeCSS and MSFT's kerberos additions to slashdot. Or, say, someone emails some of this code to the kernel mailing list directly. Now, nearly the entire team of linux developers, among other projects, has seen the 'forbidden source'. IANAL, but MSFT could possibly use the fact that they saw the 'forbidden source' as justifications that now they're now privy to MSFT's proprietary software models. They may use this fact to either sue future developers, or inhibit future development of such projects. Both of these things are bad for OSS/free software, and are good for MSFT.

This may sound like some grand paranoid conspiracy theory and doomsday scenario, but as someone posted to LinuxToday, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get you."

By allowing the instruction set presented to the world to be set by software the chip has a lot of advantages in terms of customizability and turnaround time for fixing bugs. Software is also more compact that the corresponding hardware so the chip is overall less complex and presumably more reliable, once debugged.

There is another whole category of applications that may become possible thru use of the native instructions, or better, by custom design of a logical instruction set for a given use.

Four revisions ago, the transmeta chip took half an hour to boot Windows. Consider where they'll be four revisions from now before discounting them on speed alone.

This information and more can be found in a good Technology Review article I found on Linux Today here.

This wa[s] sent to TRG by NetWare customers using Oracle who wanted an
easy path to get from NetWare to Linux.

Oracle cuts NetWare support

Oracle is to drop its support for Novell's NetWare in a move which
analysts say will kill off the operating system as a database
platform.

According to Linux Today, Microsoft say that the code is safe after the attack (presumably as safe as it was before, ahem...)
Info here ;


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This Story has been unposted. 2000-10-22 03:23:33 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (27405 reads)

Why would LinuxToday pull their piece on this M$ advertisement? Are we witnessing a conspiracy in action? =)

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Me pican las bolas, man!
Thanks

The link given above and included here to the story in LinuxToday leads to a This story has been unposted page. Here is the link to the new location of the story.

The link given above and included here to the story in LinuxToday leads to a This story has been unposted page. Here is the link to the new location of the story.

Non-biased does not mean "prefer Red Hat", but it would mean not making comments like "recovering from Red Hat Linux 7" on many stories, and if someone submits story which seems negative, actually do some checking (of course, this should be done nonetheless, but it doesn't seem to)

The sites I feel most interesting these days are LWN and Linux Today

I sent in a few links to LinuxToday for a story about the SpecWEB99 numbers from Dell recently. Here is this link to the resulting story.

The bottom line is that Dell has been submitting systems to the Special Performance Evaluation Corp (SPEC) to be included in the SpecWEB99 results. Dell using the Red Hat TUX 1.0 web server has kicked the butt of all other submissions with the single exception of the IBM eServer pSeries 680 with 12 CPU's running Zeus. The Dell / Red Hat Tux 1.0 (8 CPU) numbers come in at 6387 simultaneous connections. The IIS/5.0 systems highest score is on an IBM Netfinity 6000R (4CPU) comes dragging in at 1582.

Hope this helps.

Tony

While Derek Burney didn't have a whole lot to say of substance to CNBC's Bill Griffeth, he did have the following nugget when it came to Linux, Microsoft, and .NET:

"As we looked at moving our applications to the Web, it became clear that .NET is the way to go. By incorpoating .NET servicves into our own applications, including Linux, we can strengthen them."

Speaking strictly for myself, good luck, CmdrTaco & all the crew...

Bugs are hard to avoid -- thankfully, you were dealing with "white hats" this time. By the way, isn't it funny this information is already available on other sites... ?

not the editors
WTF is an editors job then?
Hm, editor; one who edits. Hence, they should edit whatever post is going to be posted. Of course, anyone who confuses Adobe with a little house of mud probably isn't too apt at clicking either. It is getting horrendous. Slashdot tries to push itself as a journalism site, yet all they really do is publish other peoples gibberish with links.
Bring Slashdot back to what made it popular, a link site with a message board attached to it. It was a portal, and that was what it was good at. It should not be a news site. It should not be for journalism. The only time I admired the journalism on slashdot was when Jon Katz posted a feature. While I seldom agree with Jon Katz anti-witchhunt and extremist point of view -- it was/is journalism.
The "journalistic" content of slashdot now consists of interviews with their friends and collegues, and occasionally someone with higher visibility that has input from the message board instead of Slashdot "journalists".
I'm finding myself looking at other sites like linuxtoday.com for real nerd-news. They just link, and that's what Slashdot did to make it popular.
I suppose I can't blame them, the old philosphy of do it till your popular then do what you want seems in effect. Unfortunately a lot of the people who made slashdot what it is today are getting fed up with the constant idiocy spewing forth from the posters.
The only person that I think doesn't make routine mistakes and blanket idiotic statements is CmdrTaco because it seems he still holds the ideal of slashdot there, post links with summary and if you have something to add, add it -- otherwise just let the link be.


nerdfarm.org

Red Hat are working on their own kernel-based webserver (I'm afraid I can't remember what it's called), presumably including features required to compete with existing web servers.

here. plus, I received the same press release from the O'Reilly flack this morning touting the story. Slashdot posting stuff because a flack told them about a story. Will wonders never cease.

"I'm really clueless about operating system technology -- please select Linux for me."