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Ubuntu hits new high in Linux boredom

NewsForge - Sat, 07/19/2008 - 3:00am

Last weekend a friend was moaning about endless problems with Windows XP on his desktop PC. We installed Ubuntu 7.04 on it. The problems went away. That started me thinking about my own "daily driver" computer, a Dell Latitude that also runs Ubuntu 7.04, and it made me realize that I hadn't thought about my laptop or its operating system in many months. Linux -- especially Ubuntu -- has become so reliable and simple that for most end users it's simply not worth thinking about, any more than we think about tools like wrenches and screwdrivers. Does this mean desktop GNU/Linux has become so boring that it's not worth noticing?

Categories: LAMP News

ISO/IEC Recommendations on Appeals and Latest ODF News - Complete document as text

Groklaw - Fri, 07/18/2008 - 3:18pm
We have the entire ISO/IEC recommendations document [PDF] as text now, the memo with attachments, including all four of the appeals against OOXML, sent by Alan Bryden, Secretary-General and CEO, ISO, and Aharon Amit, General Secretary and CEO, IEC to the Technical Management Board regarding the disposition of the four appeals. They suggest deep sixing them.

Thank you to everyone for helping. Erwan has pulled it all together for us, a massive job, and he's created an index also, so you can quickly find what you are looking for, all in one place. I'll make this a permanent page, after we finish one other part of the effort, to insert links to materials referenced.

Meanwhile, some rather odd things have been happening in OOXML/ODF land. First, Alex Brown, the convenor of the BRM, has put out a * press release* entitled OOXML will take second place following Microsoft's announcement to support ODF, says Dr Alex Brown. He says this: According to Dr Brown, OOXML will now represent the "legacy" of MS Office documents that the world has accumulated to date, following Microsoft's announcement that its Office suite will add native support for ODF. Is he a spokesman for Microsoft now? And why would you need a standard if all it does is represent old proprietary documents from a single vendor? Then we get to the scary part.

Categories: LAMP News

Jump start your Web app deployment with a JumpBox

NewsForge - Fri, 07/18/2008 - 1:00pm

Software installation, deployment, and configuration can be a headache and a time sink for systems administrators. To ease the process, JumpBox delivers preconfigured Web apps that run as virtual appliances on any machine, across platforms, irrespective of operating system.

Categories: LAMP News

Explore your database with Talend Open Profiler

NewsForge - Fri, 07/18/2008 - 11:00am

Over time, organizations replicate, migrate, or add complexity within database systems, often times losing control of the quality of their data. When applications begin to fail because of invalid, corrupted, or out-of-date data, the free, GPL-licensed Talend Open Profiler can give data analysts, database administrators (DBA), and business users the ability to research data structures and improve data quality. Through the use of Open Profiler, users can be alerted to hidden inconsistencies and incompatibilities between data sources and target applications. Through data analysis, business users and technical analysts can communicate both data structure and content needs.

Categories: LAMP News

Is SCO finally dead?

NewsForge - Fri, 07/18/2008 - 6:00am

Even though SCO has suffered another legal defeat, the company looks like it has enough willpower, if not sense, to keep its legal losing streak going.

Categories: LAMP News

Use xfs_fsr to keep your XFS filesystem optimal

NewsForge - Fri, 07/18/2008 - 1:00am

The XFS filesystem is known to give good performance when storing and accessing large files. The design of XFS is extent-based, meaning that the bytes that comprise a file's contents are stored in one or more contiguous regions called extents. Depending on your usage patterns, some of the files contained in an XFS filesystem can become fragmented. You can use the xfs_fsr utility to defragment these files, thus improving system performance when it accesses them.

Categories: LAMP News

Proprietary software? Counsel objects

NewsForge - Thu, 07/17/2008 - 1:00pm

Nathan Zale Dowlen objects to proprietary software, so when he opened his new law office, he outfitted it with Ubuntu Linux and open source software. Cost was the main factor in his decision at first, but he has since come to appreciate the security found in FOSS and the ease of use found with Ubuntu.

Categories: LAMP News

Sweet Home 3D: simple interior design

NewsForge - Thu, 07/17/2008 - 11:00am

Remodeling? Like free software? If you answer "yes" to both questions, try taking Sweet Home 3D for a spin. The open source, cross-platform 3-D interior design application is simple to use and simple to learn. You don't create individual objects in Sweet Home 3D like you do in a modeling app like Blender; instead you focus on the layout and design of the rooms themselves.

Categories: LAMP News

The Day After and Motion to Intervene Denied as "Wholly Inappropriate" - updated

Groklaw - Thu, 07/17/2008 - 10:40am
The media is beginning to cover the Order in the SCO v. Novell trial. Here's a sampling:
  • Information Week: "In a decision Wednesday, Utah District Court Judge Dale Kimball, who had previously ruled that Novell, and not SCO, owns the rights to Unix, found that SCO improperly collected Unix royalties that rightfully belonged to Novell. Kimball ordered SCO to pay Novell $2.5 million in restitution....SCO may have gotten off lightly...."
  • The Inquirer: "However, Judge Kimball's ruling granted Novell only a fraction of the amount it sought at trial, which was more than $20 million. He accepted SCO's argument that its licence deal with Microsoft and its SCOsource licence sales were primarily about Unixware, although those necessarily implicated SVRX licences as well."

Remember when SCO began its media blitz? Stories everywhere. The world thought it was exciting to imagine Linux on the ropes. Now, when SCO is told it behaved improperly and must pay millions, only a few even note it. No one cares about SCO in failure, except for some who feel disgust, like Matt Asay.

What a strange ride it's been. You'd think the folks that wrote all those stories about SCO eating Linux's lunch would at least place a notice on their Corrections Page: "Um. About that lunch stuff, we were totally duped by SCO. They haven't won anything. The best they can do is not lose as big as they could have."

Wait. Hold the presses. Todd Weiss reports the SCO loss as a loss in an article titled SCO loses another round in Unix fight, must pay $2.55M to Novell in ComputerWorld: At the beginning of its massive legal fight against Linux in 2003, The SCO Group Inc. imagined a day when companies like IBM, Novell Inc. and others would pay it large amounts of cash for alleged infringements on SCO-owned Unix code.

Instead, even as those legal fights meander through U.S. courts, the tables were turned and SCO yesterday was ordered to pay $2.55 million to Novell for collecting Unix licensing revenue from Sun Microsystems Inc. that it wasn't entitled to collect.

That is what just happened. The company that told the world they couldn't wait for their day in court got it, and they lost. And there's more to come.

Anyway, we're still here, and we're not going anywhere. I know SCO is not over yet. Don't forget, the Novell litigation was a sideshow. Covering SCO is a marathon, not a sprint. The main event is IBM, still to come. And I expect SCO to have to pay through the nose to them for what turned out to be frivolous litigation, since the Order yesterday said that SCO has made no claims about UnixWare against IBM, and it doesn't own the copyrights to what it did sue IBM over.

I see everyone notices SCO got off light, and no word yet from Novell.

Categories: LAMP News

Nifty tools for your Asus Eee PC

NewsForge - Thu, 07/17/2008 - 8:00am

It didn't take the enterprising community of Asus Eee PC users long to come up with some great tweaking tools for this Linux-based ultra-low-cost laptop. Just a few weeks after the official launch of Eee PC, the first tweaking utilities started to appear on the EeeUser forums. Today, you can choose from a wide selection of tools that can help you to customize your tiny laptop and make your work on it more efficient.

Categories: LAMP News

Mail server benchmarking with Postal

NewsForge - Thu, 07/17/2008 - 1:00am

The Postal project includes three programs aimed at benchmarking mail server performance. The main program, postal, sends email messages to a specified list of destination addresses at a specified rate. Postal can let you see how fast your system can process incoming email and thus can help you measure improvements to your mail server when you are making software and hardware changes. For example, you can use postal to tell you whether switching to a different IMAP server will allow you to deliver more messages per second on the same hardware.

Categories: LAMP News

Judge Kimball Rules at Last! - Updated: The Order as text

Groklaw - Wed, 07/16/2008 - 3:22pm
Judge Kimball rules in SCO v. Novell! Here it is [PDF] at last! I haven't read it yet myself, just quickly skimmed it enough to see that SCO owes Novell some money ($2,547,817 plus interest probably -- SCO can oppose -- from the Sun agreement) and it had no right to enter into the Sun agreement, but it did have the right to enter into the Microsoft and other SCOsource agreements. Requests for attorneys fees are separate, and that part comes next. Then appeals. I know you want to see it immediately, so let's read it together, and after it's clear, I'll come back and explain some more.

OK. I've read it now once through, and the big picture is this: Judge Kimball did not change anything in his August 10th order, which I was afraid might happen. He could have, had he heard anything that he didn't know when he made that order. So, SCO breached its fiduciary duty to Novell, converted funds, and so it has to pay. That is ironic, in that this case started with SCO accusing Novell of slander of title, and asking for millions in damages. Instead it has to *pay* Novell millions.

However, Judge Kimball accepted SCO's argument that UnixWare is the latest version of UNIX and that it was the foundation of all the other agreements, even though SYSV was also involved, or so SCO thought. He accepted SCO's argument that if SCO was wrong about owning the copyrights, and it was, then it's too bad for the licensees -- they just got less than they thought they were paying for, and that is a matter for them to work through with SCO. So if EV1, for example, wanted its money back, or part of it, it would have to sue SCO.

I think this is an appealable issue for Novell, but I don't know if they will bother. This was all about money, this trial, and very narrowly about whether SCO owed Novell anything from the Sun and Microsoft and SCOsource licenses. The rest was decided already on August 10th. And SCO doesn't have much money left, if any, so I would guess that if SCO appeals, Novell will raise issues it certainly can in this new order. And it's a bit hard to fit SCOsource into the APA, since it was just a strange and vague bird. But if SCO doesn't -- and to my mind the order seems designed to discourage it, since if they do appeal, they risk being found liable for even more money than now ordered -- Novell then has to figure out if it is worth it.

Categories: LAMP News

Peer to Patent Project Extended and Expanded - Mark Webbink Exec. Dir. of New Center

Groklaw - Wed, 07/16/2008 - 2:28pm
I'm very happy to tell you that it's just been announced that the Peer-to-Patent project, which is a cooperative project between New York Law School and the USPTO, has been extended after the first year's trial. It's also been expanded to include business methods patents! Yum. I can't wait to see you try to invalidate some of those.

And better still, Mark Webbink has been named Executive Director of a new Center for Patent Innovations: "I'm pleased to announce the new Center, which will lead the way in reforming the international patent system," said Mark Webbink, Executive Director of the new Center. "CPI will become a pioneer in the patent field, helping to create an environment of participation with patent examiners, scientists, and knowledgeable experts, thereby improving the understanding and effectiveness of patent systems. Establishing the Center for Patent Innovations was a natural progression for the Peer-to-Patent project."

By the way, there are some new applications up for review, I see. So if you know anything about booting utilizing email, client-initiated authentication, internet memory access, disambiguation in dynamic binary translation, creation of hanging protocols using graffiti-enabled devices, version control for application message models, or matching a slideshow to an audio track, this is your moment.

This is the first time the public has been involved in a project that actually can directly impact decisions by a US government agency. The press release says that the Law School has now launched a project to develop software specifically for the public to use to help improve the patent system.

You remember Mark Webbink, I'm sure. He was, for most of Groklaw's life, Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Red Hat. He's a great guy, and super competent, so this is wonderful news. Perhaps you remember he let me publish an article of his on Groklaw about understanding open source software way back in December of 2003.

What does this announcement mean to me? That all our efforts to understand patent law and how to effectively search for prior art have been for a practical purpose, so dry as a bone as the subject is, let's keep on trying. And it means the USPTO recognizes that they do need help from the FOSS community to get prior art to their examiners before damage is done. That was the stated purpose of the Peer-to-Patent project, after all.

Categories: LAMP News

OpenDomain.org owner: Selfless FOSS helper or domain squatter?

NewsForge - Wed, 07/16/2008 - 1:00pm

OpenDomain.org is an organization that offers to provide free use of certain domain names to worthwhile open source projects. Ric Johnson, the leader of OpenDomain.org and the owner of dozens of domain names, says he has spent thousands of dollars registering those domains in order to prevent "squatters and phishers" from snapping them up. He's keeping them safe so you can have a chance to use them. However, to some people, based on Johnson's past practices, it's not clear how OpenDomain.org differs from other organizations that buy up domain names in the hopes of future gains.

Categories: LAMP News

KDE 4 problems highlight shift from community users to consumers

NewsForge - Wed, 07/16/2008 - 11:00am

The reasons for the user revolt against KDE 4, which we reported on yesterday, are still being sorted out. They appear to be a complex mixture that includes the assumptions that KDE used in its planning, the rush by distributions to include a release that was not ready for general use, and sensationalism in free software blogs and journalism. One reason that has yet to be discussed is one of the potentially most significant -- the apparent shift in the FOSS user base. Judging from the quickness and thoroughness with which KDE 4 was rejected, the audience for free software seems to have shifted from a small group of knowledgeable users that treasures innovation to a larger one that values convention and familiarity and is actively suspicious of change.

Categories: LAMP News

Arch Linux for the DIY Linux user

NewsForge - Wed, 07/16/2008 - 8:00am

There's no dearth of Linux distributions for desktop users or even for running high availability servers. But if you are a do-it-yourself computer user, your choice of Linux distros is fairly limited. You can build Linux from scratch with Linux from Scratch or compile your own set of packages with Gentoo. But if you want a distro that teaches you the basics of Linux as you set it up; is well documented, lightweight, and zippy; and has a dependency-resolving packaging system, you need Arch Linux.

Categories: LAMP News

The YouTube/Google/Viacom Stipulation and An Encouraging Patent Order, as text

Groklaw - Wed, 07/16/2008 - 3:48am
Here is the Viacom-YouTube Google stipulation on privacy, technically called the Stipulation Regarding July 1, 2008 Opinion [PDF] that YouTube just announced, as text. [Update: It is now so ordered, signed by Judge Louis Stanton on July 17, 2008.]

The important part of the agreement is this: Google gets to substitute values for User IDs, IP addresses and Visitor IDs before handing the database over to Viacom. The parties will figure out next exactly how to do it so that unique values are substituted, so that you can still tell when one individual uploaded 10 zillion videos and 10 zillion individuals only 1 each. Viacom promises not to circumvent the encryption. The parties have not agreed about encrypting the records of any uploading by Google/YouTube employees in the course of their business activities, something I gather Viacom wants to get hold of as part of its quest to prove Google is responsible for infringing content, despite the safe harbor section of the DMCA:The parties do not agree whether the arrangements contained in Paragraph 1 should extend to records reflecting the business activities of the parties' employees and agents, including whether the obligations are reciprocal.

Ah! Reciprocal. Otherwise known as tit for tat. Google would like to know what Viacom employees have uploaded to YouTube if Viacom is going to ask for the records on Google employees. So, while the parties argue about all that, the records will be encrypted and turned over to Viacom, and then within two weeks the parties will try to work out the rest, and if they fail, either party can bring the dispute to court. I think you could say they've agreed in the big picture sense that they have agreed to go after each other while leaving end users out of it, so long as they are not employees of either party.

And someone sent me encouraging news of a decision in a patent infringement case by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Muniauction v. Thomson Corporation [PDF], on the subject of obviousness. It's interesting enough that I've done it as text also, right after the short Viacom/Google stipulation.

Categories: LAMP News

Improve system performance by moving your log files to RAM

NewsForge - Wed, 07/16/2008 - 1:00am

The Ramlog project lets you keep your system logs in RAM while your machine is running and copies them to disk when you shut down. If you are running a laptop or mobile device with syslog enabled, Ramlog might help you increase your battery life or the life of the flash drive on your mobile device. As a side effect of using Ramlog, you will be less likely to be caught out by a daemon that suddenly starts sending a message to syslog every 30 seconds and saps your battery keeping the hard disk spinning.

Categories: LAMP News

16 July 2008 - Apache VelocityTools 2.0 Released

Apache - Tue, 07/15/2008 - 7:06pm
The Velocity developers are pleased to make the second beta release of VelocityTools 2.0 available for download. Downloads are available here: http://velocity.apache.org/download.cgi Major development in VelocityTools 2.0 has been essentially complete for some time, and the focus is on fixing the remaining bugs, completing the documentation, and providing clear migration paths for users of VelocityTools 1.x. Significant new features in 2.0 include very flexible, composable toolbox configuration (via either java, xml, and/or properties), lazy-loading/initialization of tools, the VelocityViewTag for embedding Velocity within JSP, simplified embedding of VelocityTools in other frameworks, an assortment of new and improved tools, and much more. This should be useable as a drop in replacement for Tools 1.4, with a few minor exceptions where things already deprecated earlier in 1.x have been removed. The 2.x series of VelocityTools also requires both Velocity 1.5+ and JDK 1.5+. At this point, the new tool management and configuration facilities are extremely stable and useable. Documentation has continued to improve dramatically and is nearing completion. There are no open or known bugs in this release nor significant changes anticipated before 2.0 final is released. We are very interested in all feedback regarding Tools 2.0, especially regarding backwards compatibility with apps designed for Tools 1.4 or earlier. We aim to enable a smooth, incremental transition for developers and their applications.

[ Category : Apache Velocity ]

Categories: LAMP News

eBay Subsidiary Marktplaats.nl Grows its Business with Sun's MySQL Database

MySQL - Tue, 07/15/2008 - 5:59pm
Marktplaats.nl, the largest E-commerce platform in The Netherlands, and part of eBay since 2004, is growing its business on Sun Microsystems' MySQL Enterprise™ Unlimited database subscription offering. To enable their fast growth, protect site uptime, and contain IT expenses, the company is using a flexible and scalable infrastructure based on open source technology such as MySQL™ -– backed by Sun's 24x7 global database support team.
Categories: LAMP News
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