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A lot of web sites have a ToS that say they can use anything you post on it for their own purposes.

For example things I post on Slashdot get reposted on other web sites, proof of this and does Linuxworld have a connection to Slashdot to repost what I type here on their own web site?

Just encrypt all of your crap, and don't have illegal stuff.

Amen. With all the practically unbreakable, freely available encryption solutions out there, I don't understand why any criminal who, even occasionally, touches a computer, doesn't use a generous amount of encryption. Encryption stymies any attempt at, after the fact, detection.

• The Year of the Linux Desktop! (2007)
• 2006: The year of desktop Linux?
• 2005 will be the year of the Linux Desktop
• Linux breaks desktop barrier in 2004: Torvalds
• I am convinced that 2003 is going to be the breakout year for Desktop Linux.

"It doesn't support open standards like Microsoft OpenXML. *snark*"

You have to be kidding, but I will address the one issue. In your alternative universe how is an ISO approved standard - not standard. Why didn't MS use OpenDocument as the default file format, that way there wouldn't have to be a file converter written. What was the Microsoft Linux lab doing up to now. 'OpenDocument is an approved ISO standard .. Office Open XML is an approved Ecma standard'

Not to defend Microsoft, but... (Score:3)

...under the patent cooperation agreement, both companies are paying each other upfront in exchange for a release of patent liability. Additionally, Novell also will make running royalty payments to Microsoft based on a percentage of revenue from open-source products.
Basically, the agreement ensures that Novell Suse customers are protected against patent litigation from Microsoft.

Johansen has now moved to the US and is working in MP3tunes' San Diego offices as a software engineer. His first project: a new digital music product, code-named Oboe, which is designed to "bring digital music into the 21st century," according to Robertson, the company's chief executive officer

There is more to every story than you might think. If Apple is now pretending that their "delayed" release of x86 XNU was due to miscommunication or preparation, that's called "public relations" not "truth".

Perfect software? Thats a joke right? Check out their bugs that seem to never close:
http://bugzilla.xensource.com/bugzilla/buglist.cgi ?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_st atus=__open__&product=Xen&content=

XenSource certainly wanted to give a warm fuzzy to Microsoft, and bend over and take anything MS would give them:
http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;16908928 92;fp;2;fpid;1
http://www.xensource.com/partners/microsoft_resour ces.html

XenSource will not work with VMware on standards, since XenSource is in the backpocket of Microsoft. Easy as that.

XenSource is not Open Source. It is out for money and nothing more, like all Corporations

This article smacks of MS shilling.

I agree.

It has all the ear-marks of a "Submarine" article, as defined by Paul Graham.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

That this is true is born out by IDC's evaluation of the data.
http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;17540595 24;fp;2;fpid;1
"After a long period focused on cutting costs and buying servers just to run current applications, enterprises are once again investing strategically in systems to handle future workloads, said IDC analyst Matt Eastwood. IT organizations are once again being asked to support real growth, he said."

This article contains some MS PR spin that the Gartner version did not: that purchases of Linux servers is short sighted because Linux server cannot be 'strategically' deployed but MS servers can. An odd assertion given the fact that many deploying Linux servers to replace Microsoft servers find that one Linux server can easily handle the load of 3 or 4 Microsoft servers, and do so more reliably and with less maintenance. Microsoft servers are notorious for being able to support only ONE application per server, a deployment model recommended by Microsoft itself, if not to improve MS server speed and stability then to improve Microsoft's sales figures.

As you point out, comparing sales levels of prior years with those given this year by Gartner and IDC, with Microsoft FUD wrappings, either Microsoft server shares have been declining while Linux' have been rising, or these "Consulting" firms are merely passing on MS PR memos with their own corporate dressing on them. I have no doubt that Linux server shares are rising, having grown from a few percent a few years ago to 31% this year, AND that Gartner was and is a mere extension of Microsoft's PR department. After all, they've been revealed as such in prior "research" reports that they put on line where they claimed the report was their work but they forgot to remove the Microsoft PR logo from the article.

http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;45624193 1;fp;4;fpid;1

And for those of the 4400 where taken in 1990, searching for your special talent and still arguing emacs versus vi - you must have missed the shootout in Infoworld while you were gone.

Now what's that damn password?

Totally agree. Especially since they were apparently planning it for this release, so I was kind of looking forward to it.

The last time I installed Linux (SuSE 9.3) it took about 30-40 minutes, and the drivers for my video card were downloaded with the first run of the Online Update utility, which ran automatically at the end of the install. Drivers for everything else were already there.

I went looking for Suse 9.3 but only found links to the live distro, but I dont really want to pay for a distro.

However, I hope your comments reflect that it is better/easier for the layperson installing Linux. At least for this state-of-the art distro version you are referring to.

Though, I googled that fact and LinuxWorld doesn't share your experience

I like and use Linux, but I have to really question what is up when you say:

I have had far more problems with unsupported hardware in Win2k/XP than in Linux

That amuses and angers me, for the simple fact of, how many times have I tried to get some fancy hardware working in Linux (e.g. multi-format stick/card memory reader, webcam, multi-function printer/fax/scanner) and I spend days, weeks even pouring through lists and asking questions, and eventually get things 75% working, when it is about 3 mouse-clicks easy in Windows.

Granted, people who have worked through these problems before, and do this stuff all the time, could probably do that faster, but that is not going to be a typical end-user experience.

Ross Anderson's Critique

IBM's Rebuttal

Trusted Gentoo

IBM's rebuttal does a decent job of allaying some of the fears - for example, it states that it will not prevent you from running any OS & programs you wish to on your own computer (which, for the record, I believe - witness the Trusted Gentoo project and e.g. this this link). They state that their approach to Trusted Computing is not particularly well-suited to DRM, and on the face of it, I agree - there seems to be little attempt at restricting the user of a computer with the TPM from doing what they want. However, in my opinion, as a base for an utterly crippling DRM regime, distributors simply could not ask for a better setup, as I'll argue a little later.

So to re-cap, it seems that if you are running Trusted hardware, there are no restrictions on what you can do on your computer in isolation; you can install Linux, run any number of Open Source apps, etc. But the keyword here is in isolation, and it is here that the dangers of Trusted Computing are revealed. For you see, Trusted Computing enables the usage of remote attestation wherein a server may request a hash of all software currently running on your computer. This hash is, for all intents and purposes, unforgeable, and if you disable your TPM (as IBM stress that you can, and again for the record, I see no reason to disbelieve them), no hash will be sent. The server may then assess this hash of software (or note that no hash has been provided, in which case it may well treat your computer as Untrusted) and decide, based on what software you are running, to simply not serve you with whatever material you requested - for example, it may decide that it will not deliver MP3's to your computer unless it knows for a fact that the receiving application is one that is known to encrypt the content as soon as it is received (so that e.g. it simply cannot be viewed while not running in Trusted mode) and which will take every step to ensure that once received, the unencrypted content never leaves your machine (e.g. by being written to CD, e-mailed , etc.). As you can imagine, the above scenario is not at all far-fetched as the **AA/ other media distributors are positively *creaming* themselves at the thought of stamping out casual file-sharing or even making backups for your own use in some of your other devices.

So we are left with the situation where someone who does not use Trusted hardware (and is thus unable to respond to attestation requests) or those who do run Trusted hardware but whose software fingerprint is not deemed acceptable by the server will simply not be granted access to certain material, rendering such people at a big disadvantage. And it's no good buying hardware free from Trust chips from China or such places on the "black market"; this offers no advantage at all as Trusted hardware, as mentioned, does not stop you using your computer the way you want in isolation; the problem only occurs when you try to interact with other computers.

So far, this sounds unpleasant but not too bad (although I would urge you to read Anderson's linked essay for some more imaginative and serious abuses), but if we allow ourselves to follow the slippery-slope, we end up at the state where ISPs will not allow your computer to access the internet at all (for surfing, e-mailing, anything) unless you are running Trusted hardware and software. Obviously, the social, political and legal barriers to this occurence are non-trivial, but we've all seen ridiculous Acts qu

Agreed.

Being Novell they have street cred. Netware gives them a wedge into big businesses which no other Linux distro has. And I think they know and understand the businesses' needs better than any of the others, and have the tools to complement Linux to cater to those companies (Zen, identy management and such).

I think Novell and SUSE make a good fit. SUSE now has a desktop platform which they can work WITH, and not AGAINST.

They're clearly aware of it, and their CC EAL4+ certification was part of their plan, a certification which I think only SUSE still holds (among the Linux distros).

What the article could have mentioned is that Novell is proving to their customer that they can do without Windows, migrating internally to Linux desktops (see Joe Barr's http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/03/23/1 755222). Here's another interesting link http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;16020781 22;fp;16;fpid;0

Not to mention the Cisco Unity Express (CME) voicemail blade that you can pop into a router. A few more Cisco products that have Linux support:

Aironet

VPN Concentrator Clients

Heh, Sourceforge has a thing to say about Cisco and Linux as well:
http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/Cisco_Linux.ht ml

Best quote of all:
"It takes a company approximately one desktop administrator to support 40 Windows PCs, while one administrator can support between 200 and 400 Linux desktops." says Cisco IT Manager

This is from Feb 17th, 2005.

LWN.net: VA Linux and Sun Wah Linux Join Forces Around Debian
LinuxWorld.au: VA Linux, Sun Wah team on Debian Linux

Martin Michlmayr(Debian Project Leader)'s comment

Get a number of large Fortune 500 companies to commit to switching to Linux. Then hardware and software developers will say, "Hmmm... If I want to sell into these companies, I have to support Linux."

According to the press release, 65 teraflops is only the predicted theoretical performance; it hasn't actually been built and tested in Real Life.

I would agree with you for the most part. However, I think she genuinely harbors some sort of grudge against IBM outside of the IBM vs. SCO theatrics. Take an article about Itanium from August - "Itanium-Armed Start-up To Menace IBM's Precious Mainframe Monopoly". The article itself is not particularly venomous towards IBM, but it certainly isn't an unbiased report on future competition for IBM. It just seems kind of absurd to go out of your way to prepare an article about a start-up company 'menacing' IBM's 'monopoly' when IBM already has plenty of more noteworthy competition.

But, as you said in another post, one has to wonder if she's doing this purely for the troll-value of it all.

I'm not so much a fanboi as I really should have copied this article instead.

Seem to me that this is no more than just some "terra-fying marketing" campagin, no different than Symantec's Vincent Steckler saying "If 90 percent [of software] was open source there would be just as many attacks, only worse. Imagine smart hackers with [access to] source code". OSRM, like Symantec, is trying to use scare tactics to try and CREATE A DEMAND WHERE THERE IS NO MARKET for their products and services - only a "potential" market.

...to work with AMD's 64 bit Opteron. And that was last November, so I daresay it's even better now... check it out here.

PLUG: Good tools, too!

Here's the bandwagon... you know what to do...

...about Linus Torvalds:


One of the most memorable parts of that evening was when my Linux NFS [Network File System] server died, to the point that the console seemed completely dead (the load of all those Doom WAD files obviously got to it). I was about to press reset when Linus stepped in and said he wanted to work out why it had crashed, so he could fix it. I then watched in complete amazement as Linus exploited a remote file truncation bug he knew about in the NFS server I was running which allowed him to peek into the proc filesystem on the apparently dead server and work out enough to find the bug. Up till then I had considered myself to be a pretty good programmer, and quite good at debugging system crashes, but that incident taught me that I would always be an also-ran who just isn't in the same league as
people like Linus.


This is from an interview here.

The linked article quotes the tech center's director:

"Also, at around 100Mbps read and write to disk, it is faster than our SCSI system which has an I/O of 50Mbps"

Never mind the whole base-2/base-10 "mebibyte" business... why can't people learn that the case of the "b"/"B" is significant!? Clearly he meant megaBytes, not bits.

By the way, Apple advertises the Xserve RAID's throughput in excess of 200MBps.

- Peter

According to Australian LinuxWorld is reporting that Novell's CTO has issued an ultimatum to SCO: put up or shut up.

According to Australian LinuxWorld is reporting that Novell's CTO has issued an ultimatum to SCO: put up or shut up.

but your next step should have been to contact the press and community sites

We did, check out LinuxWorld Australia and news.com.

I also tried submitting an artical on /. yesterday or the day before. My artical got rejected. As my writing skills lack polish I just assumed that it wasn't clear enough for the editors.

Nevertheless, I predict that GNOME/GTK will eventually usurp the lion's share of open-source desktops. It all comes down to money. In this case, the money depends upon software licensing.

What I'm really betting on is the Trolltech (www.trolltech.com) GUI programming toolkit, Qt, upon which KDE is based. (Gnome is based upon GTK, aka the Gimp Toolkit).

News as a source of reliable trade information has gone to hell. Once focused on objective reporting of the facts, much of the media is now convinced that what you really want is news analysis. Unfortunately, news analysis is turning out to be nothing more than a reporter's opinion.

"IDC's findings, published Monday in a study commissioned by Microsoft Corp., "

Here

That's right: they (or rather, someone from their advertising agency) chalked "Peace, Love and Linux" all over Chicago and San Francisco. The artist got thirty days' community service, and IBM got fined ten thousand dollars. Here's the story Slashdot ran at the time.

Since there's not going to be x86 support for Solaris 9, is there any chance that maybe Solaris 9 could be eventually Open Sourced (to at least allow for the possibility of an x86 version), à la Quake II?

These are an example (they even have Linux drivers), but an 8GB unit is still over $20k (see CDW). It's going to be a while until this is affordable (2 orders of magnitude price reduction).

>ATI is providing specs and paying VA Research(I believe) to develop open source drivers. NVidia has decided to keep their drivers closed source

so which card would be perfect to use with linux and some 3d apps like softimage in windows, maya on linux?

what is the difference on the hardware side and which chipset will be the better choice?