Questioning Microsoft’s Need for a ‘Get the Facts’ Campaign

"If Microsoft offers a superior product to Linux then why would they need a 'Get the Facts' campaign? Just about any time a major publication runs a story about Linux, Microsoft gets them to place a 'Get the Facts' advertisement nearby and often right in the middle of the story. That seems pretty suspect to me. Do you ever wonder if publications run Linux stories just to garner Microsoft's ad money? Or have you considered that desperate times call for desperate measures? It makes me wonder."

AMD, Sun To build Largest Supercomputer in Japan

"At Supercomputing 2005, AMD and Sun today announced that the Tokyo Institute of Technology is creating Japan's largest supercomputer on a foundation of Sun. The system is based on Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores (totaling more than 50 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOPS)), Sun and NEC storage technologies and NEC's integration expertise as well as ClearSpeed's Advance accelerator boards."

Oxygen Icons Website Launched

Oxygen is the new icon theme being created for KDE4. Everything started in March 2005 when a bunch of KDE contributors met in Berlin to form the Appeal Project with the goal to promote KDE related projects and to push the open source desktop to another level. Oxygen aims to bring a modern, cool and very usable and consistent icon theme, in SVG format.

Thoughts on the Power Mac Dual-Core 2.3 GHz

I recently bought one of the new dual core PowerMacs. Having used the machine for a couple of weeks, I thought I would share some of my observations and feelings about it. First, let me get my biases out in the open. I have, for about four years, very happily used Linux on my desktop. Doing so has made me very comfortable with the UNIX environment in general, and with GNOME specifically. During that time, I have used OS X machines on a regular basis, so I am quite comfortable in that environment as well. Since I switched to Linux, I have not used Windows for anything more than the occasional bit of software testing or lab work, and generally feel quite uncomfortable with it. Thus, this article is very much written from the perspective of someone who finds OS X and Linux pleasing on principle. I implore the reader to make his own value judgments based on my comments.

Meet the Man Who Will Save the Internet

If a certain US senator and a certain EU commissioner are to be believed, the internet is five days away from total collapse as governments are finally forced into a corner and told to agree on a framework for future Internet governance. Both are wrong, but there is a very real risk that an enormous political argument resulting in lifelong ill-will centred around the internet could developed unchecked at the WSIS Summit. The fact that it hasn’t already is effectively down to one man: Mr Khan. He was chosen as chair of Sub-Committee A during the WSIS process, and his remit includes all the most difficult and contentious elements - not just internet governance but also how the world will deal with issues such as spam and cybercrime.

Sun Hopes To Make Waves with ‘Niagara’

Sun this week is unveiling its long-touted "Niagara" processor, the third major rollout in the past two months for the company, which is aggressively trying to separate itself from its past as a vendor focused solely on its SPARC-Solaris platform for high-end customers. The chip offers eight cores per chip running up to four instruction threads each and addresses the growing issues of energy consumption and heat generation by using only 70 watts of power.