Tag Archives | PHP

Ubuntu 5.04 release candidate available

By Ted Roche on March 31, 2005 in Home Page

OSNews reports “Ubuntu Linux 5.04 release candidate. The release candidate of Ubuntu Linux 5.04 is available.”

Ubuntu is getting a lot of attention as an up-and-coming distribution. It is Debian-based, has a slick interface, comes with a try-before-you-commit Live CD, and it’s free for the download. BitTorrent links are available at the web site above. Took very little time to download the ISO files using BitTorrent – remember to leave your client running after you get your copy to share the load with the rest of the community! – since many other people were downloading too. That’s what good peer-to-peer file sharing is all about.

Microsoft funds a report that finds it’s server software is secure!

By Ted Roche on March 25, 2005 in Home Page

OSNews reports “Microsoft funding of security report decried. Two researchers surprised the audience at a computer-security convention last month with their finding that a version of Microsoft Windows was more secure than a competing Linux operating system. This week, the researchers released their finished report, and it included another surprise: Microsoft was funding the project all along.”

I heard about the report and I was really pleased that Microsoft may have finally started catching on with Windows Server 2003 in shipping a product that’s reasonably secure out of the box. To say it is about time is a vast understatement. To claim that redeems Microsoft, or has any effect on the 500 million insecure Windows installations out there is wrong. From my limited experience with W2K3, it’s a lot more difficult to work with, since lots of features are disabled by default, and turning them on is far from intuitive. It’s pretty much too late for me. I’ve taken my business elsewhere.

Novell Brainshare PR stories

By Ted Roche on March 23, 2005 in Home Page

Novell/SuSE is running their BrainShare conference this week, and it looks like they have loaded up on announcments:

OSNews notes “A Bunch of Novell News. Why Novell’s internal migration to Linux desktops is a landmark story. Novell preps Linux Desktop 10: Desktop search, note taking features will surpass Windows, execs say. Novell buys N.H.’s Tally Systems to benefit ZenWorks.”

InfoWorld: Application development reports “Novell preps Linux Desktop 10. SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Linux is ready for the corporate desktop, and the forthcoming version of Novell’s Linux Desktop offering will go head-to-head against Windows, Novell executives said here this week at the company’s annual BrainShare gathering.”

Slashdot also picks up on Novells internal migration storry, with “Brainshare Reports: NLD 10, Novell’s Linux Switch. An anonymous reader submits “Computer World has an article about Novell Linux Desktop 10, which was just announced at Brainshare, that it plans to compete directly with Windows. One of the biggest things about NLD 10 is that it will have the desktop search engine Beagle as a feature.” Also from Brainshare, Joe Barr writes on NewsForge about the significance of Novell’s ongoing (multi-year) transition to Linux for all of its 6,000 desktops. Consultants and software sellers of all stripes won’t soon run out of TCO arguments for the products they want to push, but Novell claims to have saved $900,000 last year in Microsoft license fees alone.”

EU not happy with Microsoft protocol licensing

By Ted Roche on March 18, 2005 in Home Page

Eric Bangeman (eric@arstechnica.com) of Ars Technica reports EU not happy with Microsoft antitrust compliance. “According to the European Commission, Microsoft is not fully complying with terms of the EC’s antitrust remedies… According to the EC, the royalty and license terms offered by Microsoft are unreasonable and unfairly exclude vendors of open source software”

Obviously, Microsoft still needs to learn the meaning of the word interoperability. Competing on features and support could make Microsoft such an industry leader.

UPDATE: If you enjoy dry British humour, OSNews points to a UK ZDNet column: “Microsoft’s Windows Communications Protocol Licence Explained. Microsoft is guilty of breaking EU competition law, and has come up with a way to make amends. ZDNet dissects the resulting licence and find a very peculiar world indeed.”

Microsoft and Sun recommend… their products!

By Ted Roche on March 16, 2005 in Home Page

OSNews points to EDS: Linux is insecure, unscalable. Large enterprises should not use Linux because it is not secure enough, has scalability problems and could fork into many different flavours, according to the Agility Alliance, which includes IT heavyweights EDS, Fuji Xerox, Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, Dell and EMC.”

And what exactly is the purpose of this “alliance?” According to the article, to compete with IBM and HP. What a surprise. And what software do they favor? Theirs, of course. What nonsense!

All OSes likely have an appropriate place in a well planned enterprise.

Apple may release 2-button mouse, can ergonomic keyboards be far behind?

By Ted Roche on March 16, 2005 in Home Page

OSNews points to the story making the rounds that “Apple May Release Two Button Mouse. According to AppleInsider Apple is working on a two button mouse to further assist people switching from Windows.” Isn’t it a bit early for April Fool’s columns to be hitting the internet?

I’ve been running my iMac for a year with a Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse Blue. Just plugged it in, and the right mouse button pops open context menus, the scrollwheel scrolls and the middle click pastes in terminal windows. It Just Works.

Mad Penguin interviews PostGreSQL PR Lead

By Ted Roche on March 15, 2005 in Home Page, PostgreSQL

OSNews points to an Interview with Josh Berkus of PostgreSQL. “The PostgreSQL database project has recently released Version 8.0, which was received with quite some fanfare, mostly due to its first-ever Windows port. Mad Penguin talked with Josh Berkus, one of the core team members, to find out how 8.0 has fared since its official release on January 17, 2005.” Interesting and brief reading for those curious about the project. While MySQL has gotten the lion’s share of the attention in the Free/Open Source Software market so far, PostgreSQL is a worthy and feature-packed competitor.

OSNews and ZDNet: lies, damned lies and statistics

By Ted Roche on March 15, 2005 in Home Page

OSNews echoes ZDNet’s lead paragraph: Fedora takes off as Red Hat declines. “Latest statistics for the Web server market show that Fedora, Red Hat’s free Linux operating system, is growing in popularity. But the picture isn’t quite so rosy for its enterprise offering.”

But Read the Fine Article (RTFA) and you find out that 400,000 web sites are now running Fedora, placing it at number 5. And 20,000 less sites are running RedHat, which still leaves it in the top spot with 1.61 million deployments. That represents a 122% increase in the hobbyist/experimental distribution of Fedora, and a 1.2%, yes, One-Point-Two percent decrease in RedHat.

The survey cites only 4 million web sites in this survey, so this is not the same study as the March Netcraft study I pointed to earlier with sixty million sites surveyed. So what’s the subset here? The article is unclear.

Fedora had a new major release in the last year, and it is attracting attention, while RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 has just been released, after the date of the survey. RedHat is facing stiff competition with Novell/SuSE and other commercially supported versions of Linux, but still seems to be holding its own or slipping ever so slightly, though not increasing its market share. Competition is Good.

While the analysis isn’t a gross misrepresentation, if I were RedHat, with 1.6 million customers @ $349 a year (or more) each, I would see the picture as more rosy. That’s likely not the case. The original Netcraft article isn’t clear what “RedHat” is it talking about: my suspicion is that that number is a summary of RedHat 7, 8, 9 and two versions of Enterprise Linux. It would be interesting to see what the uptake of RHEL is, and whether it is RH 7.0 and 8.0 boxes that are being sent out to pasture.

The RSS Bubble

By Ted Roche on March 13, 2005 in Home Page

Dan points to brother Steve’s posting on The RSS Bubble.

Steve Gillmor: Bodcasting. “Splash! Fwoop! Znorf. It’s the sound of nextgen RSS plays parachuting into the Valley, Rte. 128, and everywhere there’s a broadband connection. Odeo, Brightcove, ourmedia, the Times — by this time next spring the forest will be thick with bees circling in search of unpolinated flowers. The RSS Bubble is here.”

Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

Dust off those business plans! Search and replace ASP with RSS! Crank up the burn rate. man, does this game ever end?

Apress gives away free ebooks

By Ted Roche on March 11, 2005 in Home Page

It seems that Apress is offering some of their older titles for free download. I snagged a copy of their “Programmers Introduction to PHP 4, ” a 4 megabyte, 478 page PDF. It looks like the full version of the book. The download site also offers the source code. The book includes a plug for the newer edition of PHP5 and MySQL, released in June of 2004. This is a smart move on Apress’ part. Hope it pans out for them financially.

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