Monthly Archive:: August 2008

After 10 years of supporting Linux, IBM continues to challenge Microsoft on multiple fronts and aims to push Linux even further into the enterprise. While IBM has competed and partnered with Microsoft over the last two decades, the Microsoft-free PC effort is perhaps its most direct assault yet. "The idea of Microsoft-free personal computing has been in the air for a while," Inna Kuznetsova, director of Linux at IBM, told InternetNews.com. "We're just partnering with Linux distribution vendors and hardware vendors to make it happen."

In an "as told to" article for CIO.com, Linus Torvalds explains how he keeps the Linux people and software on-track. Arguably the most surprising facet of Linus' management style is that he's perfectly willing to flame people when he thinks they're wrong--though he's also happy to be corrected himself. "Part of that, by the way, is not feeling shy about saying impolite things or showing some emotion. So I'd rather flame people for doing stupid things and call them stupid, rather than try to be too polite to the point where people didn't understand how strongly I felt about something." That's particularly interesting in light of several OSCON presenters who believe that the way to grow the open source community is to make projects more welcoming to would-be contributors. Do these attitudes actually contradict one another?

On August 1 2007, I published an article called "My Month with the iPhone" wherein I examined the iPhone's now well-known advantages and deficiencies and speculated extensively on where Apple was likely to take the phone, development-wise. Now that the new iPhone and the iPhone 2.0 software have been out for a few weeks, and there's been a whole new storm of praise and gripes raging, I thought it would be illuminating for me to re-visit my prognostications and take my lumps.

"AMD's plan to integrate a CPU and GPU on a single chip, codenamed Fusion, has been a hot topic since the CPU manufacturer first announced it planned to purchase ATI. AMD hasn't had much to say about Fusion lately, beyond confirming that the project exists and is still in development, but new rumors have surfaced over what form Fusion might take when it surfaces in 2009."

Terry Hancock offers a detailed dissection of the critical difference between power and freedom when it comes to understanding why Microsoft and GNU/Linux respectively are playing different games - and freedom is the only game in town for the free software. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine

I have recently been in the market for a new smartphone. The iPhone looks like some nice hardware and I'm already an AT&T customer, but after Apple's trend of pulling Apps from iTunes lately I'm just not buying. Apple has proven to me that I don't want to live in a closed ecosystem. It made me realize what my real issue with Apple is: their business practices.

OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 is a free, open source alternative to Microsoft's Office application suite. It is fantastic if you need basic office applications such as a word processor or spreadsheet at no cost. However, large organisations and power users may be disappointed by its lack of features and support. Read the full review here.

Jack Wallen of TechRepublic tried the Mandriva 2008 Spring and his verdict is "Mandriva Spring 2008 Live CD better than most other distributions fully installed." He claims that "This is, without a doubt, the finest release of any Linux distribution I have ever experienced in my 10+ years of using Linux."

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. This time we chat with Guido van Rossum, best known as the author of Python, and currently working for Google, CA where he gets to spend at least half his time developing the language.

The Windows 7 craze is barely over, and yet the internet is already buzzing with the next big thing from Microsoft: a project called Midori. The SD Times claims to have seen internal Microsoft documents detailing what Midori actually is, and they say it's the clean-break from Windows many of us have been waiting for. The SD Times article is heavy on the details, and quite technical, but luckily Ars Technica provides a more accessible summary of what Microsoft has in store for Midori.

In technology environment, keeping things simple takes lot more effort and maturity than keeping it complex. These 10 items are guidelines more than rules, that I have learned over the years doing intensive work on the IT infrastructure. These guidelines are mostly common sense and can be helpful for anybody who administers an IT system, including Linux/Windows Administrator, Network Administrator and DBA.

Take a look at the strategy of treating Linux instances as managed objects. Previous generations of management technologies all suffer from the problems of excessive complexity, heavyweight implementations, too fine-grained an approach, and so on. In effect, the area of Linux systems management infrastructure is wide open for a root and branch review.

"Apple Inc. has pulled its security engineering team out of a planned public discussion on the company's security practices, which had been set for next week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas."

Early on, it was a bit of a challenge to get Linux natively installed on the PS3. Time has passed, and a great deal has changed. Fedora 7 installs on the PS3 out of the box, with the most challenging installation steps eliminated. This article introduces the basic configuration knobs and widgets specific to the PS3 running Linux, shows you how to use them effectively, and suggests the kind of trickery that gets improved performance.