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Apparently they didn't think over the feasibility of their initial migration to OpenOffice.org. Hopefully this taught them the lesson that free as in beer and free as in speech may not be enough.

I hate to say it, but for an awful lot of people not dealing with the simplest documents OOo is still far from being viable. Moreover, MS compatibility is only a part of the problem, and probably even not the largest one. For example, a good list of what a professional such as a technical writer or translator misses in OOo Writer can be found here:

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226315

Hubert Mantel left Novell, but he has been back for quite a while. See http://www.pcwelt.de/it-profi/business-ticker/4580 68/ (German) or http://www.osnews.com/story.php/16763/Hubert-Mante l-Back-at-Novell/ or just trust me as someone working in the Nuremberg SUSE office, too. ;-)

Never, ever, in a million years would I have expected see it come to pass that Solaris was more GNU-friendly than Linux. Should it really pan out that Linux is GPLv2-only and Solaris really is released under GPLv3, will we start seeing a migration?

I haven't looked (and don't know where to look) to see if the kernel itself has any external dependencies - I'm pretty sure it doesn't link to glibc but I don't know about other libraries. Does anyone know either way and care to share with us?

Seems nobody has told the boys and girls over at Maximum PC they are a year to late the Linux desktop bubble may have already burst.

They have hired Chris Lattner, one of the lead developers of LLVM, which is an optimizing compiler. The bulk of LLVM is released under a BSD-like license, but for now it uses a front end borrowed from GCC.

But Apple is busy fixing that, too.

Plan 9 is a radically distributed OS. It was written from conception as a distributed kernel, and all aspects of the OS are distributed in ways that Linux/Unix/Windows are not. It may be older, but it embraces many distributed paradigms that few OS's in production can handle. Because it is so distributed, the many common utils are simply not compatible with the kernel without a ground-up rewrite. Emacs Emacs, X, KDE, Gnome are not ported and probably won't be. Here's a naive review: http://www.osnews.com/story.php/15235/Investigatin g-the-Plan-9-Operating-System

Are you twenex in disguise or something? Go read that thread for more reasons why you're an idiot.

To summarise, what the GUI looks like is around the absolute bottom of the list of things anyone at IBM could possibly ever give two shits about. Plan9 is a clustering Operating System and Blue Gene is a fucking huge Clustered Computer. Running Plan9 on Blue Gene is an obvious match made in heaven and a very good thing.

So what if you've heard it's "the 2nd Coming in the world of operating systems."? The Plan9 developers don't care if you never run Plan9 on your over-clocked, water cooled, AthlonXP desktop because that's not what it's designed for. It's designed for large clusters of machines that act as compute farms doing Real Work.

I do wonder why thety bother and don't just try and integrate any new ways of thinking they've come up with into pre-existing systems such as Linux or BSD.

There it is! Do yourself a favour: you admit you know nothing about Plan9. As that's clearly the case, please try to keep your tourettes-like thoughts to yourself from this point on and let people who at least have a passing knowledge of Operating Systems to discuss what is a very interesting and clever OS. Perhaps while we're doing that, you could follow some of the links on the article and educate yourself about Plan9?

Here is another editorial explaining the pros and cons of the issue.

There IS a way to "sandbox" IE, and iirc, it even works on IE7:

http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9654&off set=15&rows=30

RUNNING IE in a "runas limited user class" sandbox effect:

"It is actually possible to run IE securely: just create a throwaway restricted user account for IE use alone. The restricted account user can't install software and can't access files of other users, so even if IE autoexecutes any nastiness, it can't do any damage.

Of course, it's a hassle to log in as a different user just to browse the web. So we'd want to use "runas" to run just IE as a different user.

Unfortunately, MS has made running IE as a different user a little harder than necessary. Rightclicking and using "Run as" doesn't seem to work. What did work for me was the following.

Say the limited account is called "IEuser". Then create a shortcut to "runas /user:IEuser cmd". on your desktop. Double-clicking this will open a command prompt that runs as IEuser. Now you can manually start IE with "start iexplore". Or create a batchfile c:windowsie.bat that just contains the line "start iexplore" and you can start IE by just typing "ie". Remove all shortcuts to IE from you normal desktop and only run it from the restricted account. This way you can use IE without worry about any IE exploits"

APK

Just about everything technology related - http://technews.acm.org/current.cfm
Operating systems - http://osnews.com/, http://osdir.com/
Programming languages (like Ruby and Python and functional langs.) - http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/, http://plnews.org/
Consumer tech news - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/default.stm
And of course, http://slashdot.org/

lol
I Predicted this sort of thing in 2005.
It's a really stupid feature.
CVS shouldn't be part of the document.

$699? Hell, the PS3 has a linux based OS in it. At least for my $699 I'd be able to get a game console.

Does this mean that MS will get to sue Sony now? This is quite ironic, especially given Sony's reputation for using proprietary coding and software.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php/14043/PS3-Holy-Gra il-for-Alternative-Operating-Systems/
(link for PS3 Linux reference)

OSNews just linked an article about the first computer that could fit in this category, from 1981, the Epson HX-20.

Kind of looks like a neat idea for its time, albeit a little limited by the available information processing technology of that era.

Maybe it would just be really unfortunately if anybody else than Microsoft supported msoffice calenders?

But really, I like thunderbird simple and then to be able to add a calendar as en extension.

Wow, a copy of an OS News flame post :) (same team of astroturfers ?)

Seriously, there is none so deaf as he who will not hear.

What about all these fine standards made available by the W3C ? SMIL maybe ?

Wait, nobody uses it because MSIE, used by 80% of people, doesn't implement it. Who's at fault ?
From the Wikipedia, implementation have been made mainly for handheld and mobile devices... where MSIE doesn't rule.

Cobalt was supposed to be Linux based, not BeOS.

I've heard of a C compiler written in BASH. The capacity of a programming language to suck depends significantly on the intended application. AREXX would probably work quite well to write a Linuxfromscratch, Amigafromscratch, or AROSfromscratch installer.

Amiga's mascots have alwasy been sooooooooooo s3xy. =D

Some time back OSNews had a link to an article that demonstrates the inbuilt problem with Vista components. It seems if one of these vista components gets corrupted there is no way to fix/reinstall (other than reinstalling the entire OS) http://www.osnews.com/subthread.php?news_id=16937& comment_id=201408

http://www.osnews.com/story.php/6282/The-Command-L ine--The-Best-Newbie-Interface/page1/

There are a number of applications written in Mono, not just Tomboy. F-Spot and Beagle are a couple of the major ones that come to mind. In fact, the first hit on a google search for "mono applications" is the following link which lists many applications....

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9780

Gee this same article, *and your exact comment*, word for word...
...were posted at OS News yesterday: http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=17521

Check out her first screenshot http://www.osnews.com/img/17505/feisty1.png
Unless she's figured out a way to get the file from iTunes into Linux I bet she's downloaded that Lost episode.

"It'd be nice if you could just grab a random .deb (or whatever) file from a website and install it, having it automatically install all necessary libraries even if they're not part of the distribution and without breaking anything I've installed from elsewhere. This needs several things as a starting point: a decentralized package namespace (identifying packages with URIs could work), completely declarative packages (so that software and users can predict what'll happen as a result of installing a package, and so that the installation can be adapted to suit each distro) and the ability to have multiple versions of the same thing -- possibly all from different sources, with possibly-conflicting version numbers -- installed at the same time."

Haven't we got that already?

See also: Decentralised Installation Systems

Yes. The always amusing thing is that when it comes down to a subpoena and these types of internal documents come to light (for example, this) then they're conveniently ignored. We don't want years and years of FUD leveled against Microsoft to be invalidated by reality, now do we.

A number of other bloggers have written rebuttals to the list of 10 reasons to use Windows. Some of them are actually pretty scathing.

http://www.tipsdr.com/?p=725
http://pinderkent.blogsavy.com/archives/30
http://scott2096.blogspot.com/2007/01/10-reasons-n ot-to-get-vista.html
http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2007/01/it_won t_conjure.html

These lists were also discussed a lot over at OSNews recently: http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=17024

Until this is fixed i won't be running http://osnews.com/story.php/16937/Built-in-Vista-C omponents-a-Problem

It's kinda funny how Apple makes a big deal out of the browser, when it's the exact same browser that has shipped on all new Nokia S60 phones over a year earlier. Check it out from this December 2005 article. It's KDE's Konqueror. The Safari branch of that, more specifically.

Take a look at EDI.

Over past months, I've read a lot of people commenting on ZFS who have no idea what it is. What it is, is the next generation of filesystems, not a "tweak" of current fs technology. It just happens to "look like" an ordinary POSIX fs, from a distance (if you ignore the administration/pool stuff...) But inside, it's something new under the Sun, folks.

RAID experts don't grok it, because it does things RAID can't do (end-to-end).

Devotees of ext2fs, reiserfs (yay!), NTFS (LOL!), or HFS+ don't grok it, because none of those filesystems do what ZFS does.

Read about it before you write it off as old wine in a new bottle. To ask the question, "Does OS X need a new filesystem?" is a perfect example of missing the point. Once you've looked at what ZFS really brings to the table, you'll see why it's an inevitable future, sooner or later, and you'll stop looking foolish.

Some links I posted this week:

- http://www.osnews.com/story.php/16739/Screenshot-Z FS-in-Leopard - http://mac4ever.com/news/27485/zettabyte_sur_leopa rd/ (older rumour http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14473)

For OS X people wondering why the fuss about ZFS - summaries include: - http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/ - http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/zfs_ part1.scalable.html

"Why ZFS for home": - http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/05/why-zfs-for-hom e.html

"Here are ten reasons why you'll want to reformat all of your systems and use ZFS.": http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1446/zfs_ten_reason s_to_reformat_your_...

And some more technical explanations from Chief Engineer: - http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_end_to_end_ data - http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/smokin_mirrors

Over past months, I've read a lot of people commenting on ZFS who have no idea what it is. What it is, is the next generation of filesystems, not a "tweak" of current fs technology. It just happens to "look like" an ordinary POSIX fs, from a distance (if you ignore the administration/pool stuff...) But inside, it's something new under the Sun, folks.

RAID experts don't grok it, because it does things RAID can't do (end-to-end).

Devotees of ext2fs, reiserfs (yay!), NTFS (LOL!), or HFS+ don't grok it, because none of those filesystems do what ZFS does.

Read about it before you write it off as old wine in a new bottle. To ask the question, "Does OS X need a new filesystem?" is a perfect example of missing the point. Once you've looked at what ZFS really brings to the table, you'll see why it's an inevitable future, sooner or later, and you'll stop looking foolish.

Some links I posted this week:

- http://www.osnews.com/story.php/16739/Screenshot-Z FS-in-Leopard - http://mac4ever.com/news/27485/zettabyte_sur_leopa rd/ (older rumour http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14473)

For OS X people wondering why the fuss about ZFS - summaries include: - http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/ - http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/zfs_ part1.scalable.html

"Why ZFS for home": - http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/05/why-zfs-for-hom e.html

"Here are ten reasons why you'll want to reformat all of your systems and use ZFS.": http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1446/zfs_ten_reason s_to_reformat_your_...

And some more technical explanations from Chief Engineer: - http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_end_to_end_ data - http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/smokin_mirrors

...plenty of ignorant MSFT-aplogists' bitching about how the "zealots" are going "mad" about "Windows being teh suxx" and all after this campaign has been announced, but, please, care to tell me where the FSF fails to tell the truth with such nifty things as "signed drivers only", "protected audio path" an the like coming after consumers, which are being promised an overall richer and safer experience in casual computing, but are being entirely stripped of their fair use rights by these "added features" instead?

Vista - it's a trap thing, really. Break out as long as you can.

I want to know why this is being reported as news now and on a linux site of all places, this thing appeared on the web, OSNews if not Slashdot, months ago, and we didn't care then either.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15636

Ah, the wonders of linuxdevices/windowsfordevices/gimmepageviewsdontc areabouttheplatform

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS9902727147.html
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS5549165530 .html

writing in ungrammatical english but not uninformed, Russian lawyer Czarkoff says in OSNEWS that indeed this deal signals that linux sysems dev is selling out to the dark side. Once it looses its soul, its marketshare won't matter.

Freedom 0: the freedom of anyone who is not a Novell customer to run the program.
Why not? If someone gives me a copy of SuSE, I am free to use it. I might not be protected from any patent fireballs Microsoft may launch in the future, but I'm still free to use it. My situation is no different if MS/Novell never made this deal.

The evil in this deal isn't that it violates the license, but rather that it's an explicit patent threat by Microsoft.

RMS doesn't seem to think the MS/Novell deal violates the GPL: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=16595

This post covers it all: http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16524& comment_id=183548

A local-to-local symlink is one that I open from my own machine that points to another file on my own machine. As the post mentions, local-to-local symlinks are on by default. No problem there.

A remote-to-local is a symlink on a network share that points to a file on my own machine. Local-to-remote is a link on my machine pointing to a network share, and remote-to-remote is a symlink on a network share pointing to another network share. All of these have security implications.

For local-to-remote, a critical system file could be replaced to point to a spoofed copy on a network share. For remote-to-local, I could wind up copying or deleting files from my own hard drive without realizing it. For remote-to-remote, I could think I'm accessing a safe server, but I'm really being redirected to an unsafe server without realizing it.

Of course, if all of these features are turned on via group policy, you have full, classic symlink support (target always resolved by the client, and Win2k and XP clients can't resolve them).

This is what I've been talking about.
The ramifications are chilling. This is not new, I first saw this in '97 when they were using hidden-persistent RAM disks (on 68k Macs) accessing VRAM space (NuNV N^NuNV ( ... ) _DATAINIT etc.) and swapping it in and out like a poor mans GPU.
Yes, Macs.

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/402

http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/402/ 33600/threaded#33600

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190931&cid=157 06785

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=193487&cid=158 76421

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16282& comment_id=175413

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16257& comment_id=176371

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16374& comment_id=178043

You tell me.

http://www.wolfware.dk/intro/welcome.asp

This is what I've been talking about.
The ramifications are chilling. This is not new, I first saw this in '97 when they were using hidden-persistent RAM disks (on 68k Macs) accessing VRAM space (NuNV N^NuNV ( ... ) _DATAINIT etc.) and swapping it in and out like a poor mans GPU.
Yes, Macs.

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/402

http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/402/ 33600/threaded#33600

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190931&cid=157 06785

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=193487&cid=158 76421

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16282& comment_id=175413

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16257& comment_id=176371

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16374& comment_id=178043

You tell me.

http://www.wolfware.dk/intro/welcome.asp

This is what I've been talking about.
The ramifications are chilling. This is not new, I first saw this in '97 when they were using hidden-persistent RAM disks (on 68k Macs) accessing VRAM space (NuNV N^NuNV ( ... ) _DATAINIT etc.) and swapping it in and out like a poor mans GPU.
Yes, Macs.

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/402

http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/402/ 33600/threaded#33600

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190931&cid=157 06785

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=193487&cid=158 76421

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16282& comment_id=175413

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16257& comment_id=176371

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16374& comment_id=178043

You tell me.

http://www.wolfware.dk/intro/welcome.asp

Pegasos is an open system - including the schematics. This is similar architecture the Apple Macintosh used to be based on.

Besides with Linux it doesn't really matter what the architecture is. Linux runs just as well on Sparc, PPC, and X86.

In other words, as long as you distribute your java (derivative) code under the terms of the GPL, you are protected. This issue was discussed in detail on osnews. See the responses to Jody's question.

>> But I would guesstimate that Linux is at least 1 year away from solid NTFS support.

Aye no its there, have a look at "NTFS-3G: Full Read-Write Open Source Linux NTFS Driver" http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=15196

It runs kernel 2.6.17, which means it does not yet include the realtime patches by Gleixner and Molnar which find their way into the Linux kernel from kernel 2.6.18 on. To me, this would still mean manually recompiling the kernel, but not for long anymore!

to no longer use ReiserFS as its default FS (orig. reported on OSNews.com...don't think I've seen it here yet). I think this came out before the whole Hans Reiser affair, BTW.

SuSE contrasted the ease of upgrading ReiserFS and ExtFS versions:

ReiserFS v3 is a dead end. Hans has been pushing reiser4 for years now and declared Reiser3 in maintenance mode. Any changes that arent bug fixes are met with violent resistance. Reiser4 is not an incremental update and requires a reformat, which is unreasonable for most people.... Ext3 has a clear upgrade path. There is quite a bit of interest in the community in improving ext3, and ext4 is already under development. Like the upgrade path from ext2 to ext3, the path to ext4 is clearly defined. Existing file systems can be updated easily, and new files will be able to take advantage of the new features.

It is not just money (but the $500 goes to verisign, not MS). They have to be a commercial entity with a Class 3 Commercial Software Publisher Certificate from Verisign--read the article pointed to by the ancestor poster.

So they can eventually turn it off.

From the article:

On 64-bit x64 platforms, all kernel mode code must be signed and the identify of all kernel mode binaries is verified.

Read the ancestor post's article closely.

Vista driver developers must obtain a Publisher Identity Certificate (PIC) from Microsoft. [] This costs $500 [EUR 412] per year, and as the name implies, is only available to commercial entities.

The other thing is there are some incompatibilities with the rest of the kernel architecture that haven't been fixed and the discussion always ends up with people trying to explain to Hans what has to happen and change and Hans bitching about politics and showing some benchmarks or something. It's almost an ideal example of the process of getting code in to the kernel, show the code, respond to the requests to fix it and answer questions with something other than a benchmark. In the Reiserfs3 days the same thing happened, people asked questions about reliability and the answer almost always came with some kind of number showing that rfs3 could delete a directory of 1million files faster than ext2 could. Benchmarks are nice but they aren't reliability. In some sick way I can understand the desire to respond to an unwanted request with numbers but it doesn't cut it and you can't just snow Alan Cox, Andrew Morton and the others. They are really fscking sharp, probably sharper than you are if you can't answer their questions.

I see a couple things happening, rfs4 might be picked up by some people, there is some vocal interest in it and it's always possible, Novell/Suse is throwing their weight behind ocfs2. Ext4 is underway and looks to be the next main filesystem for the masses, Redhat is putting their cart behind this horse. The other thing is more people seem to be getting involved with XFS which is already very well supported and can scale as much as we appear to need for any time forseeable. I'm not sure what SGI is doing with it anymore but other people are looking at the code and doing things with it which is a good sign. I'm not sure who will pick up rfs4, it's possible namesys could continue and it's always possible that Hans won't be charged with anything, will be freed and might keep it going; he's certainly a volatile chap though and I'm not sure he's done himself a lot of favors with the things he's said to the media so far.