Slashdot Mirror

jagger writes: "In this ZD-Net article ex-NSA analyst Wayne Madison has issued a warning about many proprietary software packages coming bundled with NSA backdoors. This must be very troubling for non-US governments, because it means that they have no security against anyone knowing the backdoor. " This is one of the reasons China has cited in wanting to use Open Source and home-cooked solutions.

mcwop writes "\ Looks like Cobalt Networks is suing Apple over their cube, according to ZDNet UK This is interesting because Cobalt Networks settled a lawsuit over their cube with Cube Computer Corp back in January. While they are both cubes one is specifically a server though the other could be used/marketed as one in the future. Technology and lawsuits seem to go hand in hand these days. " Basically, Cobalt has alleged that Apple has infringed on their trademarks. Oh, BTW, I've patented the shape "block". I'm going to be suing for past due royalties from humanity. My ownership of the block means that unlicensed use - like buildings are money to be made! Why didn't I think of this earlier?!

FullClip asks: "In the July issue of PC Magazine, Red Hat Professional is compared to Windows NT/2000 on basis of ServerBench, which tests the maximum Transactions Per Second (TPS) for a given number of clients. Red Hat 6.1 (when tweaked) matched the performance of Windows, but showed a terrible decrease in performance at about 24 clients to a weeping 20 % of the level that Windows was able to maintain. Somehow this disturbs me. Doesn't Linux perform better than that bad in client-server environments? If someone can point me to an non-FUD benchmark site, it would be appreciated..." Is this yet another case where benchmarks have been skewed severely to show a deficiency that doesn't exist? Or is this another area where Linux needs improvement? [Updated 6 July 2000 2:15 GMT by timothy] You may want to compare this with the far different results reported by SpecWeb.

We've been choking on submissions about Napster and MP3 so here's a selection of them: Alexander Burke shared this ZDNet Article about how TVT Records (the fine folks who bring you Snoop Dogg) is getting into the let's-sue-Napster game. Borodir wrote in about how Suzanne Vega influenced the mp3 compression format, and Slashdot reader Napster Online told us about the Salon interview with Napster iCEO Hank Barry. Here's an editorial by John Perry Barlow about the whole Napster mess and a finally a ZD UK story about MP3 pirates going to jail in the future.

Tuscahoma writes "ZDNet has this story about an MI5 agent who lost a laptop containing sensitive information at Paddinton station. Does this sound like the plot of a bad spy movie (turns out that Julia Roberts picked up the laptop to return it, and now she's on the run for her life from enemy spies)?" This really does sound like a screenwriter's dream. I wonder if the machine's already been fenced, the hard drive wiped, and some Londoner is wondering at the "Property of M15. PLEASE return" in the BIOS.

MrEfficient writes, "ZDNet UK has a story in which Dirk Hohndel, the chief technical officer of SuSE Linux, clears up an earlier statement made by the chief executive, Roland Dyroff, about Linux's readiness for the desktop. "

Foxpaw writes, "Not to be outdone by Intel, according to ZDNet UK, AMD is planning on simultaneously releasing the 900MHz, 950MHz and 1GHz Athlons, maybe as early as later this month. " I do have to say that the corporate peeing match between these two is pretty amusing - but if Intel is still having production problems, then AMD can continue to leverage their high-end chips.

An anonymous user noted that "ZDNet UK has an article concerning rumors at CeBIT that MS has a team of programmers working on a Linux port of Office. The report quotes a LinuxCare employee, and is probably only slightly more solid than the same rumors we've been hearing for ages now. " Again note, purely speculative rumor. This one comes from Linuxcare's Arthur Tyde.

ZDNet UK reports that people who voted for best Linux distribution at the LinuxWorld, chose SuSE. Congratulations SuSE! (and if I might add a comment, please improve the GUI installer, maybe even release a beta version before going gold).

Eric the Cat wrote to us with one of the most amusing articles for the day. A Russian Security Consultancy has claimed that a plague of virii for Linux will be coming, thanks to Chinese hackers. Wait - it gets better. According to the security expert, *because* Linux is open source, the viruses will be even worse than in other systems. Thankfully, Jason Clifford, a Linux person, is also quoted in the article setting the story a bit straighter.

Sara Chan writes "An expert at the British government's computer security headquarters, CESG (Communications-Electronics Security Group) has endorsed Linux along with the open source model for software development as the most secure computer architecture available. CESG is the sister organisation of the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), which is roughly the British equivalent of the American NSA (National Security Agency). There is also a warning against "a competing commercial product with hidden source code." For details, see the ZDNet UK story."

Dodgie writes "UK telco BT finally announced yesterday their plans for BT Surftime, the UK's first unmetered dial-up internet access plan. It is expected to be released next Spring but doesn't come cheap... For FULL 24hr unmetered access, users can expect to pay £34.99 a month. Various other cheaper plans are also available such as weekend only and off-peak and weekend access. Looks like this could be the opportunity Britain needs to finally get onto the Internet without continually worrying about the phone bill on your 57.6 snail-link.. Full article on ZDnet."

Dodgie writes "UK telco BT finally announced yesterday their plans for BT Surftime, the UK's first unmetered dial-up internet access plan. It is expected to be released next Spring but doesn't come cheap... For FULL 24hr unmetered access, users can expect to pay £34.99 a month. Various other cheaper plans are also available such as weekend only and off-peak and weekend access. Looks like this could be the opportunity Britain needs to finally get onto the Internet without continually worrying about the phone bill on your 57.6 snail-link.. Full article on ZDnet."

egnarts writes "Drag and drop mp3's to your minidisc, and better still generate voice overs from text. See zdnet for the story " Interesting. Every time I start thinking MD is dead, something happens to it. I wonder how successful this will be. Text-to-Voice could be quite useful.

Anonyous Coward writes "According to ZDnet UK News, Microsoft is up to its old trick of breaking competing products by changing Windows. This time it's NT service pack 6, which strangely has a problem with Lotus Notes. It denies users 'access to Lotus Notes on NT unless they have been granted administrative access to the entire network.' So much for the 'findings of fact' putting Microsoft under pressure to stop this sort of thing." Related news: CEGadgets.com publishes the latest NT security hole.

Anonyous Coward writes "According to ZDnet UK News, Microsoft is up to its old trick of breaking competing products by changing Windows. This time it's NT service pack 6, which strangely has a problem with Lotus Notes. It denies users 'access to Lotus Notes on NT unless they have been granted administrative access to the entire network.' So much for the 'findings of fact' putting Microsoft under pressure to stop this sort of thing." Related news: CEGadgets.com publishes the latest NT security hole.

BoNeS writes "Alan Cox, revealed at the first ever UK Linux Expo that the 2.4 kernel of Linux could be available for developers everywhere as soon as November. Cox also revealed that in a couple of weeks he will be working "directly" for the most successful commercial Linux distributors by contracting programmers for their European operations."

The UK learns about the cost of making sure law enforcement can snoop on internet access, something the U.S. public already learned when Congress spent $500 million dollars on making sure the FBI could snoop on us. In this ZDnet UK article, the cost of police access (in both cash and privacy) is discussed. The police intend to eavesdrop on one in every five hundred internet calls - Demon Internet projects that the cost of hooking up this access to be around a million pounds per year. See also another ZDnet article which summarizes the current state of surveillance in the UK. -- michael

D4MO writes "Saw the news that the Playstation 2 will probably be delayed. Apparently, Sony is having a really hard time getting the graphics chips right, and so they will miss their December launch, and probably be in more of a Feb/March range. Sega's Dreamcast, OTOH is out already in a lot of areas."

Geert Uytterhoeven of the Linux m68k effort reports that Dell admitted it is forced to sell Windows in Belgium by an agreement with Microsoft. Microsoft and Dell have denied this accusation. By not supplying an OS-free PC, Dell would be contravening EU law which prohibits product-tying.

davie writes " Jon Hall, leader of Compaq's Unix Group, said Compaq is porting its compiler suite from Tru64 to Linux, and will ship extended maths libraries under the open source General Public License. But Compaq is also considering adopting the software installation software Red Hat Package Manager, and the Gnome and KDE desktop environments in Tru64 Unix. The story is worth reading. "

st. augustine writes "This editorial on the front page of PC Magazine UK cites the old "programmers will starve" argument and claims that open source and cheap hardware are driving people out of business, thereby reducing consumer choice." The article is mostly about declining costs of hardware, the little FUD blurb is at the end, although it seems strangely familiar to an article sent in by toolz: this little gem appears on Microsoft.com so it doesn't have to try to be impartial. Read both, were going to see a lot more of this stuff.

An anonymous reader writes "Spencer F. Katt has written a piece that among other things describes how Microsoft forced Gateway and Micron to demo their PIII machines running NT intead of Red Hat as had been planned. Nice to see the DOJ case is teaching them nothing. "

An anonymous reader sent us linkage to a ZDNet UK Article written by Martin Butler of the The Butler Group. The article doesn't say much new, it really just says linux is just the "New Thing" (Just like windows was so many years ago) and that it will factionalize when money becomes involved. And its already started to happen. My take? Bring it on! As long as a base system of kernel, libs, and utilities is compatible accross distributions, divide all you want. Debian for Hackers. Red Hat for Suits. Slackware for loons. And the 28 other assorted distributions for whoever wants them. Its about options, and as long as we adhere to a minimal set of requirements, everyone will be happy. Am I crazy?

Mark Lipson wrote in to tell us that Michael Cowpland of Corel will give a speech about Commercial Software and Hardware in the Open Source Marketplace and a demo of the Quattro Pro spreadsheet running under Linux, at LinuxWorld on March 2, 9:30-10:15 AM. The speech will be webcast on Wednesday. In related news, Eugene Lacey wrote in with an article claiming that IBM is dissing Corel's Wine plans.

Mark Lipson wrote in to tell us that Michael Cowpland of Corel will give a speech about Commercial Software and Hardware in the Open Source Marketplace and a demo of the Quattro Pro spreadsheet running under Linux, at LinuxWorld on March 2, 9:30-10:15 AM. The speech will be webcast on Wednesday. In related news, Eugene Lacey wrote in with an article claiming that IBM is dissing Corel's Wine plans.

ZDNET UK made an Interview with Corel's executive vice president of engineering Derek Burney, he's talking about Corel helps the Wine Project. But the biggest surprise is that Corel is going to release a new Distribution which is aimed to the "avrage windows user". (thanks to Linux Today for the news

One of the big stories of 1998 was the impact of ultracheap computers. The marketshare of computers which had stayed firmly stuck around 40% of US-households increased to 50%. Similarly Intel's market share collapsed in the mail-order and retail PC market: 75% of overall unit sales in the 1997 fourth quarter to about 49.5% in the most recent period. The cheapest computers reveal a trend of making money off services rather than hardware, with an associated lack of choice (don't expect to run Linux on these things): $300 PCs are shipping in France but you must use a specific ISP, zero-cost PCs are available if you agree to being bombarded by adverts even if you are not online (remember 1984: the TV things were always on), and finally zero-cost iMacs are available if you pledge to spend 3600 dollars over 3 years at some online mall. Moreover, the cost has already hit the industry: AMD is hurting while system development of Tier 1 manufacturers is leaving the US, being done instead by contract manufacturers in countries where electronics labour costs are less than a buck an hour. More people on the internet may be good, but at what cost?

Lotus CEO Jeff Papows announced to an exuberant crowd at Lotusphere99 that the Lotus Notes server will be ported to Linux, albeit not as open source. It should be available later this year. This is a U-turn for Papows. made clear it was the server.

Anonymous Coward wrote to tell us about a definite new version of Warp. This is a bit odd-no one really knows whether IBM or Stardock Systems will be developing it. Stardock has been pushing to "Linux-ize" it, but has encountered problems with the royalties setup.

Microsoft is divesting from RealNetworks. One reason is that Real did not include the interoperability features Microsoft wanted. A more intersting reason was that Real and Microsoft did not see eye-to-eye on the future of streaming, and have been feuding over future standards. Chris le Tocq, an analyst at Dataquest in San Jose, Calif. said the rare move by Microsoft is Microsoft "saying that you are not one of us". Interestingly this move came after Microsoft offered to work with RealNetworks on an underwritten secondary offering of stock, but the two companies could not agree on terms... Although normally this would reduce investor confidence in RealNetworks, its stock bounced up while Microsoft's fell. In related news, Gartner reiterated its warning not to move to Windows 2000 until 2001 at the earliest.

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.

ZDNet UK interviewed Mike Cowpland of Corel today, and predicts Linux' ease of use will rival Windows (for non-cli types) in six months time..

In an update on a previous article, Compaq is still on-track with its Linux support program. Despite claims that it was previously pressured by Microsoft not to invest in software, Intel is now openly investing in software not only for Windows, but also Solaris, Monterey and Linux: they will be funding Linux initiatives.

First off, an article in news.com regarding the upcoming 2.2 release. Pretty positive, with the exception of some of Mr. Wilson's comments (though, admittedly, some are true..) Next, ZDNet UK (who seem to have more of a clue than their US counterparts) have opened their Linux Lounge. Next up is a Linux article at MSNBC. Finally, another article in news.com about the recent release of Informix on Linux.

First off, an article in news.com regarding the upcoming 2.2 release. Pretty positive, with the exception of some of Mr. Wilson's comments (though, admittedly, some are true..) Next, ZDNet UK (who seem to have more of a clue than their US counterparts) have opened their Linux Lounge. Next up is a Linux article at MSNBC. Finally, another article in news.com about the recent release of Informix on Linux.

The head of Lotus said today that there would be no imminent port of Notes to Linux. Perhaps he thinks he has to catch up with Microsoft Exchange first... Anyway he does not seem to quite get the point that Linux is the only non-NT OS that's growing. Thanks to Extremist for the pointer.

The head of Lotus said today that there would be no imminent port of Notes to Linux. Perhaps he thinks he has to catch up with Microsoft Exchange first... Anyway he does not seem to quite get the point that Linux is the only non-NT OS that's growing. Thanks to Extremist for the pointer.

skydancer writes "ZDNet/UK report that Caldera is less than happy that Micro$oft seem to have lost a crucial part of the DOS/Windows source code they promised to turn over after the federal court ruling. Careless, really... "

Christopher Blizzard writes "It looks like SCO wants access to reverse engineer Microsoft's Remote Display Protocol to avoid the extraordinary licensing fees for their terminal servers. According to this article they may be willing to " offer a cash incentive to the open source programming community"." Note that the product is currently commercial and not open-source... but if SCO were to pay for its development and make it into free software, this would be a good move for all non-Windows OS's.

subhas sent us a link to a fairly standard anti-linux article. It covers all the usual arguments against the OS, but paints it as just the latest pawn in the database vendor wars. He doesn't question the technical stuff, just the lack of support. InfoWorld gave Linux best tech support, does that mean anything? What about Red Hat and Caldera? Maybe it isn't as much about support as marketing. Well that, and Linux can be a bit rough on newbies, but even that is changing rapidly.

We all wondered how long it would take. Caldera has created the CLE program (Certified Linux Engineer) for folks to get little pieces of paper that say they know what they're doing on a Linux box. Sent in by Lee Maguire.

I was tickled to see the Tool of Objective Truth at the UK branch of ZDNet showing... Linux crashing less than NT. This nonsense is accompanied by a positive Redhat 5.1 review

I was tickled to see the Tool of Objective Truth at the UK branch of ZDNet showing... Linux crashing less than NT. This nonsense is accompanied by a positive Redhat 5.1 review

Andrew Oakley writes "According to this ZDNet news item the SQL database software development kit, Ingres , is to be officially ported to Linux, say manufacturers Computer Associates . What's more- it may be free! As an Ingres programmer myself, I can tell you that Ingres makes for a pretty powerful database programming environment, especially when combined with C. Could this be just the start of a number of non-Internet power apps?"

writes "Intel is reverting to a pin grid array design for its forthcoming Mendocino processor, rather than using its Slot 1 architecture. " And I was just getting used to have these gigantic chocolate bar sized things inside my computers too.

Apparently June is Officialy the Lets-Talk-About-Linux month in the mainstream press, cuz we've got a steady stream of them. Christopher Blizzard sent us an article on NASA, Linux and Multiprocessing and one called Is Linux the Business? from ZDUK's Linux Focus Week. We also have a Freeware Roundup over at InfoWorld. Aaron Stone sent us another InfoWorld article, this one examines Linux and Business and comes up positive.

Apparently June is Officialy the Lets-Talk-About-Linux month in the mainstream press, cuz we've got a steady stream of them. Christopher Blizzard sent us an article on NASA, Linux and Multiprocessing and one called Is Linux the Business? from ZDUK's Linux Focus Week. We also have a Freeware Roundup over at InfoWorld. Aaron Stone sent us another InfoWorld article, this one examines Linux and Business and comes up positive.

Mark R. Bowyer sent us a link to ZDNet UKs Linux History. It's all part of ZDNet UKs Linux Focus week. Its pretty cool that we've gotten this far guys.

Jens Bäckman writes "I just found this link. Hard to believe they finally found out that Linux is a serious operating system, not just for hackers and wizards." I'm still waiting for the big PC Magazine Cover Story where they compare Operating Systems and Linux wins. Maybe somebody at ZD reads this and gives it a shot.