KIVILCIM Hindistan opines that his favorite distribution is Debian: “My workstation OS: Debian.” An interesting and brief introduction to another distribution. Link via OSNews
Archive | November, 2004
Linux Servers: Over $1 Billion Sold, last quarter
InfoWorld reports “Linux server sales top $1 billion in Q3.” Pretty impressive for a free operating system! The article is filled with statistics, many of which are interesting. Linux appears to be shipping on nine percent of new servers sold.
VFP 9.0 to be released on the Ides of December!
Andrew Coates blogs that Ken Levy announced the scheduled release of VFP 9.0 for the 15th of December. Congratulations to the Fox Team!
Would you be quiet for ten million dollars?
“The antitrust settlement between Microsoft and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) announced earlier this month included a payment of $9.75 million to the CCIA’s president, according to a report published Wednesday.” Read the full article on the InfoWorld site.
XML-RPC
XML-RPC is the remote procedure call protocol using XML for transferring small amounts of data back and forth using XML as the dta encoding. XML-RPC preceded Web Services and WSDLs and all of the standards committees, and it Just Works. For a view of what blogging aggregators and directories use for updates, check out Robin Good’s article “Increase Visibility in Blog and RSS Directories: XML-RPC Pings.” Realize if you are using one of the commercial blogging tools like Blogger or Radio, it is already performing the XML-RPCs in the background.
Blogs as a bridge from source to Big Media
Joi Ito points to an article on “How News Travels on the Internet.” It’s an interesting view of the universe, but a bit self-centered, I suspect, and probably better titled “How News Travels through the Blogosphere.” For the few of us active participants, there are millions of folks going about their daily livves unaware of blog’s existence, save an odd reference in the news once in a while.
Microsoft v. Linux patent update
Meant to update last week’s posting, but it slipped through. In eWeek on Saturday, the author of the original study on Linux and possible patent violations took Microsoft to task for misrepresenting the findings of that study:
“Open source faces no more, if not less, legal risk than proprietary software. The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does.”
NoSoftwarePatents.com
The web site of NoSoftwarePatents.com presents strong arguments why patents will badly damage the software industry. Copyrights are an appropriate mechanism to protect source code. Patents are for unique inventions, not the evolutionary progress that characterizes the progress of software.
Slashdot highlights the appeal from three of the key leaders of the Free and Open Software movement: Linus Torvalds of Linux, Monty Widenius of MySQL and Rasmus Lerdorf of PHP. Patents prevent progress.
Color printers embed their serial number in every printout
Did you know that some color printers embed the printer serial number in every printout? I’m astounded that this intrusion on our privacy wasn’t ever brought to light before. While I don’t intend to use my printer for ransom notes (at least not now!), this could have a chilling effect on whistleblowers and on protesters trying to avoid oppresive governments. Disturbing…
Register distributes IE exploit via banner ads
Register: “Early on Saturday morning some banner advertising served for The Register by third party ad serving company Falk AG became infected with the Bofra/IFrame exploit. The Register suspended ad serving by this company on discovery of the problem.” Posted via Scripting News
Ouch. Bofra is an unpatched Internet Explorer exploit for any Windows machine not running Windows XP SP2. Follow the link above for suggestions on decontaminating your machine if you think you may be affected by this.