I was at the conference call and they said the beta and the sources would be abaliable for selected partners. It seems the NDA was made to prevent leaks outside this "circle of thrust". I don't know if it violates the GPL, but the FSF is trying to read the NDA. They are not accusing United Linux of breaking the GPL, at least not yet.
I used to say that, until the release of KDE 3 and Gnome 2. Things are really improving for the end user who wants to use Linux, and in the near future I see it getting even better. We will see more Linux-based products for the end user int the near future. The only con of latest KDE or Gnome is that you need more memory than in a command line. But RAM is getting cheaper everyday, and they are still more economical in that matter than Windows XP. By the way: I am a journalist with no technical education in CS and use at home Gnu/Linux with KDE, Mozilla and Open Office. It is not rocket science! My 300 MHz with 128 RAM box would cranck with Windows XP, but goes well with Linux.
McNealy is getting too political in his diatribes against Microsoft. I feel he is not pushing for the Linux PC to help diversity in the OS market or even for the good of his own company, but simply to hurt Microsoft. The desktop PC market is in a standstill, with very thin profit margins. The merged HP is not going very well. I bet Sun won't make much money with this product, and a management change could cancel it. Microsoft will brag as a "proof" that Linux is not profitable and hurts business.
I don't see this effort of Red Hat is not going to create a 'unified desktop'. It is going to create a 3rd desktop enviroment for Linux - besides KDE and Gnome, we will also have "Red Hat".
In Brazil there is a free software project similar to that. They haven't got the resources of the german government, but as they are around for 4 years, there's already a software. The name of the software is DiretoGnu, and is a groupware solutuion somewhat similar to Notes and Exchange. The project is funded by the government of the state of Rio Grande do Sul - people that pay atention to RMS interviews must have heard of this state before.
The website of DiretoGNU (for those who understand portuguese or spanhish) is www.direto.org.br.
Koffice is thin, slick and very efficient if you use KDE (and good enough if your are a Gnome person). But they still have a long way to go. For example: last time I used it it, the programa did not supported the RTF format.
GoBe Productive, on the other hand, is way cool. In some aspects, their word processing program can replace even a desktop publishing application(like Pagemaker or Quark).
Right now there are some people developing an open source version of BeOS, under de BSD license, and trying to bring it back to life (support new hardware, etc). GPLing the office suite of BeOS will be of great help for those guys of Openbeos.org.
If IBM is talking openly about a Power PC processor, they probably don't have a deal with Apple. That's the opinion of an analist included int this article. So nexx-generation Macs may ship with Motorolla processors.
Turbo Linux is not going out of business, they are closing their US office. It makes sense as they are involved in the United Linux consortium - if a business partner of Turbo Linux has offices in the US they should look for support from the local United Linux partner (Caldera), and not from Turbo Linux instead.
Rob Malda is not fair to Turbo Linux in his post when he wrote "Ya know, I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux. Maybe that has something to do with their problems". Turbo Linux is an ASIAN oriented distribution, and they are doing quite well there. They are considered by distrowatch.com one of the "major" distributions.
Conectiva, the brazilian company in United Linux, might not be known by north american geeks, but is widely used in Brazil and South America. In some aspects their product is inferior to Red Hat, SuSE or Mandrake, but they also make some cool stuff. For instance, Conectiva ported apt-get to work with RPMs, and the "patch-man" of the 2.4 kernel is an employee of the company, Marcelo Tosati.
Heat is important if your are going to put the laptop in your lap.
Intel and AMD seem to be fighting for the fastest processor, and that is good, but in a portable computer heat and battery life are important.
We are getting to a point where regular coolers aren't going to be enough for Pentium 4 or Athlon XP. Toshiba is testing a water-cooled notebook, due to increased heat produced by high-end processors. It is good that a company care about heat and battery life. I don't want a super fast notebook processor to run a spread sheet or a text editor. Applications that require serious number crunching are better off in a desktop or a server.
RIAA doesn't need to hand any money to Microsoft, they share the same basic interests. The cultural industry and closed-source software vendores like Microsoft make big money because they can charge royalties for an intangible asset (music, software, images in motion) that can be replicated indefinitly at very low cost. DRM in hardware would benefit music records and companies like Microsoft.
hardware companies, however, would be neutral or even opposed to such a move, as it would have no impact or even a negative impact in their sales. It is hard to see why would they go into such an adventure without "external help" of Microsoft or the cultural industry.
My question is: a system with the Palladium chip will run ONLY Microsoft Windows? Will I be able to run Linux in it, or kernel developers would be locked out of secret especifications, acessible only to USA government and Microsoft?
Sunday and Monday I submited two stories about the fire and the shutdown of all the internet cafes in Beijing. I wonder who reviewed these posts, and why they were rejected...
All internet cafes in Beijing were shutdown this monday. 24 people died in a fire in an internet cafe, and the government says "the internet is destroying our children". The story can be found here.
AFAIK, the anti-trust proceedings are allowing companies like WallMart to install diferent OSs in their computers. Microsoft has a policy to OEM integrators of giving "discounts" to the ones that ship ONLY PCs with Windows pre-instaled (and even force them to even pay for a Windows license if they choose to ship another OS in a couple of computers). In reality, this policy imposes a fine to the companies that try to sell Intel computers with diferent OS - in diferent times, they were DRDOS, BeOS or Linux.
Take a look at the document "Findings of Fact", avaliable here.
With open source, governments can review code and make sure there's no backdoor in the software. With closed source, it's all a matter of trust in the company - and that's why the Chinese government is pumping up OSS.
I live in Brazil and Conectiva, leader in the (tiny) local market of Linux, got a great contract with the Navy to develop VPNs and things like that. The militaries wanted to make sure the software they were installing didn't have any secret tricks planted by alien governments (yes, these guys build a career out of paranoia feelings).
In some cases OSS can be cheaper, if you can pick in the internet a robust project with many contributors from around the world. But in other cases it can be more expansive, eg, if you can buy a closed source software off-the-shelf but choose to develop and open source program.
This concept of "blocking piracy through confusion" seems to be implemented in ilegal software sites. Type "warez" in Google and try to find a pirated copy of a software. You would find to a lot of strange links and get lost, without downloading any pirate software.
Try warez.com, eassywarez.com and new-warez.com and you will know what I am talking about. As these sites have a lot of cross-linking, they get a good ranking in Google, and will always appear first when you search.
Re:Something interesting about Moz on Windows XP
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
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· Score: 1
Let me get this straight: I say that IE is pretty damn unstable and buggy. You reply: "I agree, change your OS to Win 2k".
Wouldn't it be easier to change the browser to Mozilla (or Netscape, or Opera)? I had Win 98 pre-instaled in my computer and I can't delete that partition and migrate 100% to Linux, so I will keep Win 98, avoid paying MS an update and use Mozilla instead of IE. It's easier and cheaper!
Re:Something interesting about Moz on Windows XP
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
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· Score: 0, Troll
And IE redefines the terms "instable" and "buggy". It is a horrible piece of software, that crashes everytime. And when it crashes, it brings the whole OS down, forcing you to reboot. If your are lucky, your unsaved documents won't be lost. And let's not start to mention the security holes in IE - every month six new security problems are discovered.
I have 128 MB RAM and Mozilla is pretty solid and stable, in Windows I use RC02 and in Linux I use 0.98.
Kazaa has some servers for authentication of users. It's not 100% decentralized peer-to-peer (maybe 99,9%).
I remember there was a time when there was a Kazaa client for Linux, but they changed the configuration of their authentication servers and you couldn't log in anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Actualy, I refer to Gnu/Linux only when I am talking about Debian. They want their distribution to be named this way...
I was at the conference call and they said the beta and the sources would be abaliable for selected partners. It seems the NDA was made to prevent leaks outside this "circle of thrust". I don't know if it violates the GPL, but the FSF is trying to read the NDA. They are not accusing United Linux of breaking the GPL, at least not yet.
I used to say that, until the release of KDE 3 and Gnome 2. Things are really improving for the end user who wants to use Linux, and in the near future I see it getting even better. We will see more Linux-based products for the end user int the near future. The only con of latest KDE or Gnome is that you need more memory than in a command line. But RAM is getting cheaper everyday, and they are still more economical in that matter than Windows XP. By the way: I am a journalist with no technical education in CS and use at home Gnu/Linux with KDE, Mozilla and Open Office. It is not rocket science! My 300 MHz with 128 RAM box would cranck with Windows XP, but goes well with Linux.
McNealy is getting too political in his diatribes against Microsoft. I feel he is not pushing for the Linux PC to help diversity in the OS market or even for the good of his own company, but simply to hurt Microsoft. The desktop PC market is in a standstill, with very thin profit margins. The merged HP is not going very well. I bet Sun won't make much money with this product, and a management change could cancel it. Microsoft will brag as a "proof" that Linux is not profitable and hurts business.
I don't see this effort of Red Hat is not going to create a 'unified desktop'. It is going to create a 3rd desktop enviroment for Linux - besides KDE and Gnome, we will also have "Red Hat".
The website of DiretoGNU (for those who understand portuguese or spanhish) is www.direto.org.br.
CowboyNeal has my vote! Where can I vote for this poll?
GoBe Productive, on the other hand, is way cool. In some aspects, their word processing program can replace even a desktop publishing application(like Pagemaker or Quark).
Right now there are some people developing an open source version of BeOS, under de BSD license, and trying to bring it back to life (support new hardware, etc). GPLing the office suite of BeOS will be of great help for those guys of Openbeos.org.
If IBM is talking openly about a Power PC processor, they probably don't have a deal with Apple. That's the opinion of an analist included int this article. So nexx-generation Macs may ship with Motorolla processors.
I doubt. The release date for 1.1 beta was july 10, and it is 23rd already.
Good for them they aren't students (or lawyers, ou journalists), and they can stretch their deadlines at will.
Rob Malda is not fair to Turbo Linux in his post when he wrote "Ya know, I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux. Maybe that has something to do with their problems". Turbo Linux is an ASIAN oriented distribution, and they are doing quite well there. They are considered by distrowatch.com one of the "major" distributions.
Conectiva, the brazilian company in United Linux, might not be known by north american geeks, but is widely used in Brazil and South America. In some aspects their product is inferior to Red Hat, SuSE or Mandrake, but they also make some cool stuff. For instance, Conectiva ported apt-get to work with RPMs, and the "patch-man" of the 2.4 kernel is an employee of the company, Marcelo Tosati.
Intel and AMD seem to be fighting for the fastest processor, and that is good, but in a portable computer heat and battery life are important.
We are getting to a point where regular coolers aren't going to be enough for Pentium 4 or Athlon XP. Toshiba is testing a water-cooled notebook, due to increased heat produced by high-end processors. It is good that a company care about heat and battery life. I don't want a super fast notebook processor to run a spread sheet or a text editor. Applications that require serious number crunching are better off in a desktop or a server.
It would also be sweet to have a bettr integration with Mozilla, in a a way that, once a font is OK in KDE, it would also be installed for Mozilla.
A bit of code optimization, to make the desktop faster and more stable, would also be great.
In KDE 3 it is. I use KDE 3.01 and don't have much trouble to do CTRL-C and CTRL-V.
hardware companies, however, would be neutral or even opposed to such a move, as it would have no impact or even a negative impact in their sales. It is hard to see why would they go into such an adventure without "external help" of Microsoft or the cultural industry.
Any hint, ideas?
Sunday and Monday I submited two stories about the fire and the shutdown of all the internet cafes in Beijing. I wonder who reviewed these posts, and why they were rejected...
All internet cafes in Beijing were shutdown this monday. 24 people died in a fire in an internet cafe, and the government says "the internet is destroying our children". The story can be found here.
Take a look at the document "Findings of Fact", avaliable here.
I live in Brazil and Conectiva, leader in the (tiny) local market of Linux, got a great contract with the Navy to develop VPNs and things like that. The militaries wanted to make sure the software they were installing didn't have any secret tricks planted by alien governments (yes, these guys build a career out of paranoia feelings).
In some cases OSS can be cheaper, if you can pick in the internet a robust project with many contributors from around the world. But in other cases it can be more expansive, eg, if you can buy a closed source software off-the-shelf but choose to develop and open source program.
Try warez.com, eassywarez.com and new-warez.com and you will know what I am talking about. As these sites have a lot of cross-linking, they get a good ranking in Google, and will always appear first when you search.
Wouldn't it be easier to change the browser to Mozilla (or Netscape, or Opera)? I had Win 98 pre-instaled in my computer and I can't delete that partition and migrate 100% to Linux, so I will keep Win 98, avoid paying MS an update and use Mozilla instead of IE. It's easier and cheaper!
I have 128 MB RAM and Mozilla is pretty solid and stable, in Windows I use RC02 and in Linux I use 0.98.
I remember there was a time when there was a Kazaa client for Linux, but they changed the configuration of their authentication servers and you couldn't log in anymore.