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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading Supreme Court rules against file swapping (ZDNet)ZDNet looks at a ruling by the US Supreme Court against companies involved in file-trading. "In a unanimous decision, the justices ruled companies that build businesses with the active intent of encouraging copyright infringement should be held liable for their customers' illegal actions. "We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement," Justice David Souter wrote in the majority opinion."
Linux and the Top500Linux is making a good showing in the latest Top500 list of supercomputers. Linux systems account for 8 out of the top 10. Of those eight, six are of IBM manufacture, including five Blue Gene systems and one PPC Cluster. A SGI Altix, and Thunder, an Intel Itanium2 Tiger4 "white box" system hold third and seventh place, respectively. (Thanks to Joe Greenseid)
Norwegian Minister: Proprietary Formats No Longer Acceptable (Tatle)Tatle covers an announcement by Morten Andreas Meyer, the Norwegian Minister of Modernization: ""Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government." Taking great care not to mention the name Microsoft directly, but rather referring to "the spreadsheet almost everyone use" or saying this is the last time I will present a plan for information technology being broadcast on the net in Windows Media, the Minister sent strong signals in the direction of Redmond to open up or become irrelevant to the Norwegian Government." (Thanks to Tres Melton.)
Trade Shows and Conferences Linux-Itanium at the Gelato MeetingThe GELATO Federation has covered the Gelato May 2005 meeting. "Over 150 scientists, developers, and engineers convened from all around the globe for the May 2005 meeting of the Gelato Federation, an international organization dedicated to advancing Linux on the Intel® Itanium® processor. This was the largest gathering of Linux-Itanium professionals that the world has seen to date, with delegates from more than 30 Gelato member institutions and significant representation from Gelato sponsors HP, SGI, and Intel."
JavaOne faces open-source swarm (News.com)News.com covers this week's JavaOne conference in San Francisco, CA. "Sun Microsystems' top brass will grab the limelight at this week's JavaOne conference. But in many respects, Sun is no longer the guiding light for technology it invented. Developers and vendors report that programmers are increasingly turning to open-source projects for Java tools, forcing software providers to change with the times."
LinuxTag: GNOME Team distributed more than 1000 Ubuntu CDs to visitors (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop covers GNOME Deutschland's visit to LinuxTag. "The ten-person exhibition team from Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, and Britain distributed over 1000 Ubuntu CDs to the visitors to the Linux event. Worldwide, there are now more than 1.5 million CDs with Ubuntu and GNOME in use."
KDE at LinuxTag 2005: Summary and Technologies (KDE.News)KDE.News covers the contributions made to KDE at LinuxTag 2005. "During the booth service a lot of new potential contributors presented themselves to the project, especially in areas where there is a need of such, like the German translation team. As the demopoints were equipped with SUSE Linux 9.3 and Kubuntu, and we distributed about 500 Kubuntu CDs, many old and new users of KDE 3.4 told us of ideas of improvement, some of which are already implemented, while others will be soon, as is the case with KDE 4 multimedia."
The SCO Problem Novell Motion to Dismiss Denied (Groklaw)Groklaw reports that Novell's Motion to Dismiss in SCO v. Novell has been denied. "In short, [Judge Dale Kimball] is a careful man, who scrupulously distinguishes between matters of law and questions of fact. So, discovery, here we come. This doesn't mean that there can't be later motions, after some discovery gives the judge something concrete to go on. And it doesn't mean he believes SCO. He can't favor either side, until discovery produces sufficient facts to reach a definitive decision. That doesn't mean he doesn't have a private thought or two."
Companies Is Microsoft Buying Anti-Virus Companies to Undermine Linux? (LXer)The publication LXer ponders the underlying meaning of Microsoft's purchase of anti-virus companies. "Today, Microsoft has completed its acquisition of anti-virus company Sybari Software and announced the end of the company's Unix and Linux versions. Sound familiar? Sybari provides virus signature updates using anti-virus engines from other vendors including Sophos, Computer Associates and Kaspersky Labs." Thanks to Tom Adelstein.
Microsoft Puts Roadblock in Front of Open-Sourcing Avalon and Indigo (eWeek)eWeek looks at licensing problems with the Mono project's open-source versions of Avalon and Indigo. "The project administrator, Rodrigo Mazzilli, announced the project's launch on June 3 on the main Mono mailing list. In this note, Mazzilli said, "MonoIndigo will be a free implementation of Longhorn's communication stack [code-named Indigo] on top of Mono." "MonoIndigo will require Mono 2.0." This update of Mono isn't due out until 2006. Nevertheless, "I've also started developing some straightforward things of Indigo, like its most common attributes and classes. We plan to first implement the default BasicProfileHttpBinding, which conforms to WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 [basically HTTP-SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)]." Thus, BasicProfileHttpBinding is the .Net equivalent to one of Web Services' fundamental protocols. A few weeks later, Microsoft told The Register that "developers planning to clone Indigo or Avalon will have to first engage in talks on licensing the company's Intellectual Property.""
Linux Adoption India's renaissance: The $100 computer (News.com)News.com looks at small companies building low cost computers in India. "In about three months, a little-known company called Novatium plans to offer a stripped-down home computer for about $70 or $75. That is about half the price of the standard "thin clients" of this kind now sold in India, made possible in part by some novel engineering choices. Adding a monitor doubles the price to $150, but the company will offer used displays to keep the cost down."
Legal AMD Files Suit Against Intel (eWeek)eWeek looks at AMD's anti-trust suit against Intel. "The suit identifies 38 companies that AMD says Intel has pressured in one way or another. It says, for example, that Intel put pressure on Hewlett-Packard Co., whose PCs come with AMD chips, to limit its use of them. The suit also says Intel used financial incentives in an effort to persuade Dell Inc., which does not use AMD chips, not to do so."
Open source battles Microsoft in Ukraine (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at new legislation concerning open-source software in the Ukraine. "A battle for software supremacy within the public and private sectors of Ukraine has begun. Recently, the Ukrainian Parliament registered a "project of law" (the equivalent of a bill in U.S. terms) that may radically alter the manner in which the Ukrainian government procures software. If adopted, it will require government agencies, along with all state-owned or state-controlled companies, to give preference to open source software."
Interviews Interview with Damian Conway (The Perl Review)The Perl Review interviews Damian Conway. "Damian Conway is a frequent speaker on Perl (and often topics unrelated to Perl, such as quantum computing, Harry Potter, or the Klingon language), has written several Perl modules, and is the author of Object Oriented Perl (Manning Press) and now Perl Best Practices (O'Reilly Media) which will be available soon (although you can pre-order it on Amazon (hint hint)." Thanks to Dominic Mitchell.
Interview with Gaël Duval of Mandriva (TuxJournal)TuxJournal interviews Mandriva's Gaël Duval. "Q:Mandrake and Connectiva ... why? A:Mandriva is still a small company which is looking for opportunities to grow. Conectiva has a nice Linux market in south-america and a great product. As a result, we double the number of developers, we increase the income for the company, and Mandriva is growing."
McNealy on message (News.com)News.com interviews Sun Microsystems' CEO Scott McNealy. "Q:How do you think the OpenSolaris launch went? Have you learned anything since you put it out there? A:McNealy: I always make the Al Gore-ish statement that we invented community development. We started doing community development before we got founded. Three or four years before we founded Sun, one of our founders (Bill Joy) was pioneering the idea of open-source community-developed kernels in the operating system space, doing BSD licensing models with the Berkeley Software Distribution. We were the Red Hat of Berkeley before Linus (Torvalds, the Linux founder) was out of diapers."
CEO sees great things for Linux Networx (Salt Lake Tribune)The Salt Lake Tribune talks with Robert Ewald CEO of Linux Networx. ""Linux Networx . . . not only has evolved [as a successful business], but is itself driving the evolution of supercomputers," Ewald says. He praises the company's "clustering" approach to using numerous, linked processors to boost computing efficiency and power rather than more costly giant processors."
Resources The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin - Chapter 13 (Groklaw)Groklaw presents Chapter 13 of the online book "The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin" by Dr. Peter H. Salus. The topic of this chapter is: USL vs The Regents of the University of California.
New Audio Libre Article on GStreamerLinuxaudio.org has a new Audio Libre article (in PDF format) on the GStreamer streaming media framework entitled: Surfing the Pipeline - the GStreamer project.
What Developers Want (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet takes a look at what developers want. "Irrespective of the language programmers choose for expressing solutions, their wants and needs are similar. They need to be productive and efficient, with technologies that do not get in the way but rather help them produce high-quality software. In this article, we share our top ten list of programmers' common wants and needs."
Hacking Maps (O'ReillyNet)Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh discuss geocoding in an O'Reilly book excerpt. "You've got the address, but where is that in GPS terms? In these two excerpts from Mapping Hacks, learn how to geocode (adding geographic coordinates, such as latitude and longitude, to other information) a U.S. street address, as well as a whole database of addresses using the geocoder.us web services."
HLA: The High Level Assembly Programming Language (Linux Journal)Linux Journal covers HLA for High Level Assembly programming. "HLA will soon reach version 2.0. This version is reported to be significantly faster than current versions. For now, version 1.76 of HLA is available freely from Hyde's Web site. HLA can be installed under Linux after reading the HLA Installation Guide."
The Tenth Commandment of system administration (NewsForge)NewsForge covers shell scripting in a series on system administration skills. "If you're a system administrator, eventually you're going to need to write a shell script. If you're like me and you enjoy scripting, you'll find reasons to write shell scripts for just about everything."
Reviews Bluefish... It's A Keeper For HTML Editing (LinuxPlanet)Linux Planet looks at Bluefish for HTML editing. "Bluefish is a handy, text-based HTML editor for anybody that needs to crank out a lot of Web content, without a lot of fluff. It comes bundled with SUSE Linux 9.3 Professional as version 1.0. Don't be fooled by the low release number. Bluefish is a mature application that does its job quickly and efficiently."
The Cell Synergistic Processing Unit as a virtual file system (IBM developerWorks)IBM developerWorks presents an excerpt from LinuxTag 2005 paper entitled "The Cell processor programming model". "The Cell processor from Sony, Toshiba, and IBM® is this year's most awaited newcomer on the CPU market. It promises unprecedented performance in the consumer and workstation market by employing a radically new architecture. Built around a 64-bit PowerPC® core, multiple independent vector processors called Synergistic Processing Units (SPUs) are combined on a single microprocessor."
The PBX Is Dead; Long Live VoIP (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet takes a look at Asterisk. "While the computer industry has changed vastly, telephone systems until relatively recently have changed only superficially. They are expensive, proprietary, and often so arcane that only factory-authorized dealers have the remotest clue how to manage them. This, coupled with the emergence of open source Voice over IP (VoIP) technology, leaves PBX on the verge of obsolescence. In this article I'll look at Asterisk, a Linux-based open source softswitch, and why it heralds the end of PBX."
CivicSpace Labs: Better politics through open source (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at the CivicSpace Labs project. "CivicSpace is picking up where the technical arms of the Dean and Clark campaigns left off. Mostly, this means developing a set of GPLed tools to help progressive political groups build and publish Web sites, blogs, forums, and photo galleries, create polls and surveys, organize events, create mailing lists, and more. Rosen, co-founder and director of CivicSpace, says that while his organization's software is designed with political organizing in mind, it's in use by other kinds of civic groups as well, including groups of poets, churches, and even a fox-hunting information portal."
Novell Linux Small Business Suite 9 (PC Magazine)PC Magazine reviews the Novell Linux Small Business Suite. "With the Novell Linux Small Business Suite 9, Novell delivers an integrated suite of server and client software for file sharing, application serving, e-mail and collaboration, productivity tools, and most everything else you need for a small business network. And it all runs on Linux -- which, unlike NetWare, supports a wide variety of applications, offers a robust platform for future development, and continues to capture the hearts and minds of corporate America in addition to those of the open-source community."
Miscellaneous Mozilla Author Nigel McFarlane Dies (MozillaZine)MozillaZine reports on the death of Nigel McFarlane. "Nigel also contributed more directly to the Mozilla project, adding comments to Bugzilla bug reports and participating in discussions. Last year, he was a speaker at the Mozilla Developer Day 2004 conference. Outside of Mozilla, Nigel was known as an advocate of Web standards and author of two books about JavaScript. He was a prominent open source analyst and commentator."
Project Consolidation Results (LinuxMedNews)LinuxMedNews covers an effort to converge open-source Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. "The results in short: FreeMED said no, and OpenEMR said "lets see". The openEMR community has decided to use the integration of the new FreeB codebase into openEMR as a test case to see if Uversa and the openEMR community can work together. As a result Uversa has put the standalone release of FreeB on the fasttrack, and we will be making an annoucement regarding its release soon."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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