David Adams Archive

Analyst Rob Enderle has written what is sure to be a controversial article explining his conversion from an open source proponent to a disillusioned opponent. His reasons don't focus on technical merits, but on side issues such as the fanatical intolerance for dissent and ignorance in Linux forums (making it hard to get help sometimes) and the fact that when your boss expects everything to be free it makes it harder to exceed expectations. Food for thought, but he might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Scott Charney, chief security strategist at Microsoft, told developers at the TechEd 2003 conference in Brisbane, that information collected by Dr Watson, the company's reporting tool, revealed that "half of all crashes in Windows are caused not by Microsoft code, but third-party code" . . . Charney also reinforced Microsoft's message to developers and network administrators that they needed to build secure applications and networks "from the ground up"

Reader "xhargh" took great interested in the earlier reported story on OSNews that Windows95 can be shrunk down to under 5 MB. By using instructions from BOFH and others at irc://irc.xbetas.com/Micro95, he was able to shrink down Windows 98 until it's under 4.5MB in size. Look here for sceenshot and filelist.

The word open gets thrown around pretty gratuiously in the tech world, resulting in a lot of confusion. A very detailed article in The Rational Edge examines the phenomena of open computing, open standards, open source software, and proprietary commercial software, how they differ, and how they're similar.

From a Washington Post article: Lindows, a version of the open-source Linux operating system aimed at consumers put off by the cost of Windows, has been on the market for only a year or so, but it's already made some impressive gains: It comes pre-installed on desktop computers from more than a dozen off-brand manufacturers, and its San Diego-based developers just released their fourth major update.

In a world of constant security struggles, insurance companies are throwing their hat in the ring. Companies will now have the option to take out a policy on their IT. What effect will this have? It could be big. Remember, insurance price is based largely on risk. This could be bad news for companies with software known to be insecure. Read the article here.

India is shaping up to be a big battleground in a Microsoft vs Linux fight. An estimated 10% of PCs in India shipped with Linux this year, and it Indian software development industry is important for many global companies. With a talented and educated, but still economically disadvantaged, workforce, India is fertile ground for Linux to gain prominence. Microsoft knows what's at stake, and even recently dispatched Bill Gates to India, though some think that the visit only drew attention to Linux.

PC Buyer's Guide has posted a shootout comparing Max OS X to Windows XP to Linux, comparing basic, factory-included functionality. It includes a huge side-by-side chart. The overview seems to be pretty evenhanded, and isn't too preoccupied with declaring a winner and drawing much of a hard and fast conclusion. The bottom line: OS X is a very usable and elegant OS, XP has a leg up on some functionality (and of course more apps), and Linux is an impressive contender.

A small 3rd party software company, Golden Code Development Corp, has ported Java2 1.4.1 to OS/2.

ZDNet takes a look at Indigo, the next major version of Microsoft's web services platform, which is scheduled to be released concurrently with Longhorn, the next major Windows OS version. Indigo is believed to be aimed directly at enterprise-class web services platforms like the Java 2 Enterprise Edition ones from BEA and IBM.

A recent study by analyst Evans Data concluded that KDE has a small edge, preferred over Gnome among Linux developers 65% vs 56% (with some respondents using both).

Linux World Expo is underway, and Gentoo has announced the release of version 1.4. It's available at the usual mirrors.

With the arrival of the AMD Opteron and Intel Itanium, commodity servers built on these processors have joined proprietary RISC systems from IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and others in the 64-bit landscape. With prices starting at just over $2,000, Opteron and Itanium systems — running Linux or Windows — are already carving out a niche in high-performance computing clusters, where they are used to run compute-intensive scientific- and financial-modeling applications. Eventually they will replace their 32-bit forebears in corporate datacenters, and clusters of them may even challenge 64-bit Unix systems costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. More at Infoworld.

Tulip Computers, which bought the rights to the Commodore name in 1997, is "taking over" the main C64 web portal and will be making a vast library of old programs and games available, legally, for download.There are still a lot of C64 enthusiasts out there, some using old hardware, but probably many more using emulators to relive their youth. The downside: Tulip is planning on defending its trademarks, which may mean that fan sites might be getting harrassed. More at PC World.