Slashdot Mirror

kripkenstein writes "Jim Zemlin (executive director for the Linux Foundation) gave a talk at LinuxWorld saying that the open source community should stop poking fun at Microsoft. From the VNU article: 'Open source vendors have to recognize that Windows is here to stay and that together with Microsoft it will form a duopoly in the market for operating systems. This also requires that the Linux community respects Microsoft rather than ridicule it. "There are some things that Windows does pretty well," Zemlin said. Microsoft for instance has excelled in marketing the operating system, and has a good track record in fending off competition.'"

AOL bought Netscape to gain an advantage by integrating the features of its portal with the browser, something that Netscape's been doing with its Netcenter portal. This would allow AOL to move back to being a proprietary, fee-based online service... something MSN tried and failed at. Interestingly, there will be little for Barksdale and Andressen to do, once AOL takes over... Time to set up a Mozilla based startup? In related news, Sun's McNealy disputed Microsoft's claim that the Sun-AOL-Netscape deal changes anything about the DOJ court case. Update I wonder what all this will do for newhoo, and Red Hat, both of whom have received Netscape investments.

AOL bought Netscape to gain an advantage by integrating the features of its portal with the browser, something that Netscape's been doing with its Netcenter portal. This would allow AOL to move back to being a proprietary, fee-based online service... something MSN tried and failed at. Interestingly, there will be little for Barksdale and Andressen to do, once AOL takes over... Time to set up a Mozilla based startup? In related news, Sun's McNealy disputed Microsoft's claim that the Sun-AOL-Netscape deal changes anything about the DOJ court case. Update I wonder what all this will do for newhoo, and Red Hat, both of whom have received Netscape investments.

Other than Linux, speech technologies are proving a hit at Comdex. Despite Microsoft's recent claims of "innovations such as speech recognition", the event is dominated by the three speech heavy weights: IBM (ViaVoice), Dragon Systems and L & H. L & H demonstrated their new Internet technology which enables a user to ask the computer a question in English. The computer finds the answer to the question on the web, and responds using voice synthesis. Meanwhile the recent announcement by Corel that the whole Office 2000 suite will be ported to Linux (and free to users) hopefully means Dragon's Voice Recognition technology will be ported. Indeed, Adam Cody pointed out that Linux is mentioned in one of their new job offers... For those that don't get Maximum PC (previously Boot), you might be interested to learn that in the comparison of WordPerfect 8 and SmartSuite Millennium to Word, only the Microsoft lacked voice recognition capabilities. Moreover WordPerfect scored a KickAss product award with a score of 9, while SmartSuite scored 8.

I was supposed to post Adam's link a long time ago, but I can't remember whether or not I actually got round to asking Dragon Systems for confirmation... so I'm posting it now anyway. If anyone from Dragon Systems feels like commenting, please email me.

Mike_Miller writes " Putting Linux at yet another advantage, Corel has announced that by late 1999 it will be giving away its WordPerfect Office 2000 suite for free for personal use to Linux users."

ESR writes "The Wall Street Journal called me less than an hour ago to quiz me about the Halloween Document.

I gave them the sound bites they were looking for. In the process I found out that they've already talked with Microsoft -- and Microsoft has officially admitted that the memorandum is genuine!

This fact should become public knowledge no later than tomorrow evening (Nov 3) when the WSJ story runs.

As you peruse your WSJ tomorrow, the distant noise you hear will be me -- laughing my butt off at the people who leapt to accuse me of having been hoaxed, or even of perpetrating the hoax myself."

For those that can't wait, news.com is also confirming it. Thanks to David Fred for this link. Update! VNUNet believes Microsoft sanctioned the leak since it gives credibility to Microsoft's claim that Linux is competition for them. Microsoft's UK marketing manager also says Linux is not a threat. This reader's comment points out that the document focusses on License forking, not code forking. Links from LinuxToday.

Barry de la Rosa writes "There's a story on TechWeb about the new Linux kernel, due "by the end of the year". Interesting to see a mainstream pub'n like this hyping an OS release - doing what MS pays millions for in PR... "

Oracle plans to distribute and support Linux, probably licensing an existing distribution to bundle with their database. However they will still support all 4 major distributions ( including I assume Redhat (US), Pacific HiTech (Japan) and SUSE (Europe)) wanting to be the people who are called if a user has a problem with Linux. Read more below. Over 20,000 Linux developers have signed up to Oracle's development programme while the total number of developers has doubled from 55,000 to 110,000 over the past few months. This may have helped cause this momemtous announcement.

Yesterday at Internet World, Larry Ellison criticised Microsoft's servers everywhere' distributed computing model showing it for it is: a strategy to avoid admitting NT's scalability problems while maintaining high revenues with per seat licensing. Ellison's solution still follows the network based vision he had for network computers (now sort of dead). However instead of relying on Java, he may now be relying on Linux and Oracle's Database technology: Oracle will be investing over $100 million in a developer program to encourage developers to build "Internet Computing" applications, based around Oracle's database -- with as carrot free software licenses, training and tools.

With IBM's interest in e-commerce making it push Java, Oracle's interest in network services such as iFS (Internet File System), and Intel's recent murmurings about application specific devices all make for an interesting battle shaping up between the computing industry and Microsoft.

Nate writes "Ed Di Cristofaro of HardWire has announced he will extend his hardware testing to Linux along with the usual Windows testing. "It's quickly spreading in popularity and has the potential to fall right behind Windows and into the #2 spot for desktop operating system users." Click below to read on.

Martin Hepworth writes "Looks like SUN are bowing the M$'s 'user-friendly' installation with a deal with Install Shield Software. "

Johan Walles writes "I dunno whether "scoop" is the correct term for this, but anyway: slashdot.org is on tenth place of the site rankings for the "Computers/Internet" category on Sixdegrees link Forty more votes would put Slashdot on third place (before www.linux.org), and 170 votes would put it first (above www.icq.com and www.cnet.com). So if all sixdegrees users reading /. would go "slashdot-effect" the poll, a whole bunch of new readers might very well see the light and come to /. for their daily updates :-)."

James S. Baughn writes "Seeing as how there aren't any good Linux humor sites, I've created Humorix: "All Linux Humor. All Copied Mottos. All the Time."

Exile57 writes "The music industry is trying to end the proliferation of the pirate music scene. Apparently, bootleg CD's are a booming market in other countries. On top of the CD's being pressed illegally, the industry is also a bit miffed at the amount of pirate MP3 sites on the Internet. Here's the story as told by CNN."

Andrew Dalke writes "Python 1.0 was just released It is an implementation of Python (my favorite language :) for the Java virtual machine. With it you get the full power of a very high level dynamic language able to access all of the Java classes, including awt, java beans, swing, jdbc and corba. It includes a binary version of OROMatcher to implement perl5 style regular expressions. I worked with the most recent beta version and didn't come across any bugs. The only problem I had was the startup time, which was about two seconds on my Indigo2 compared to the fraction of a second for the C implementation, but much of that was the JVM starting up. We also needed to sidegrade to Netscape's 4.05 AWT 1.1 Preview release to develop applets. The biggest advantage was the interactive nature of the implementation where I could test new code or examine the behaviour of different Java classes without recompiling. Overall I estimate that it took me about a quarter of the time to implement my project in JPython instead of straight Java. *advocacy on* I can predict people will comment on two things about Python as a language, so let me preemptively address them here: 1) Python isn't as flexible as Perl -- sure, but it is a lot cleaner in general and easier to do OO programming. I rarely notice the lack of the more baroque Perl control features since Python's exception handling and ease of creating helper classes simplify tasks like finalizing resource handling during error conditions. Python's real flexibility is integrating new functionality like Java classes, COM objects or database support in a straight-forward, modular fashion. More to the point of this announcement, you can't get a Perl applet running on top of the JVM. 2) Python uses indentation and newlines for scoping and statement end instead of {} and ; -- most people find it enjoyable once they get used to it (and when using an editor like emacs that understands the language syntax). It is a suprisingly nice feeling to be several blocks in at the end of a function definition and only having to press 'enter' to finish instead of ';enter}enter}enter}' to fulfil the requirements of the parser. *advocacy off* "

Robert Macaulay writes "There is a new CScene up: Issue 5"

Barry de la Rosa wrote in to sun to ask for more info on their recent announcement that they are joining Linux International. Hit the link below to read their PR Statement...

First and foremost, Sun sees joining LI as an opportunity to foster further innovation in the UNIX space, especially in University and research facilities, which typically have more freedom to experiment and innovate than commercial markets. We encourage such innovations and look forward to incorporating some of these innovations into future versions of Solaris. In addition, we support all efforts to increase the exposure to UNIX in all areas, especially the educational and research environments.

Q. What will your principal activity be within LI?

A. David's role on the LI board will be to ensure that the Linux UltraSPARC ports are up-to-date; Sun's role is to ensure that the members of LI can take advantage of the very latest features of UltraSPARC processors. Chief among these are the VIS instruction extensions for graphics, encryption, compression and I/O performance. We also want to ensure that Linux can take full advantage of all of the performance boosting capabilities of the Sun UPA (Ultra Port Architecture) cross-bar switch.

Finally, we want to ensure that all of the latest device drivers are up to date and we want to foster compatibility between Solaris and Linux device drivers at the DDI/DKI interface level (Device Driver Interface and Driver Kernel Interface).

Q. Would Sun ever consider releasing software under an Open Source licence, a la Netscape?

A. We believe that licensing is critical to maintaining the integrity of software; for example, while Java is free, Sun licenses it to ensure the standard is maintained and the software is not corrupted.

Q. Would you consider (as suggested on /.) releasing a distibution of Linux on your machines as a cheap, low end solution?

A. Sun has always, and will continue, to offer a license for Solaris on all our systems. There are currently no plans to bundle Linux on any systems.

Q. Do you see a coalition forming between the Open Source community and the anti-MS brigade - seeing as both yourselves and Netscape can now count yourselves as members of both - and could this, in conjunction with the DOJ's action, end (or seriously stifle) MS's domination of the OS market?

A. Unfortunately, we cannot comment on any matters relating to the DOJ's actions. However, we do not see any direct correlation between these two.

Is it just me, or has today been looong as heck? Allright, first off, the Slashdot Q&A thing is still coming, and we have a (ahem) Victim to start routing questions. Contact Clifton Wood with your questions. Linux, or other. Easy or Hard, Bring it on. We'll post it, and let the Slashdot Readers try to answer it! Next, Sam Smith sent me A Psion 5 Review thingee. It's funny and interesting if you need a distraction. Lastly, Matthew Miller Sent us a link to some interesting info about MacOS 10.