The IT sector today is a complete mess. The end-users rarely understand this, but most insiders reach a point when they realize that things should be different. The problems are numerous but they all reduce to a basic principle. IT and consumer electronics companies are interested more about money than helping people solve their problems. Of course companies need to make a profit and nobody denies that. They should however make money by helping people and not by creating more problems for them.
The GNU General Public License, which is the most widely used free-software license and is used to license the open-source Linux kernel, is set for its first revision in 13 years. Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, last week weighed in on the upcoming challenges facing GPL Version 3.
Open source database vendor MySQL AB will release version 5.0 of its eponymous database management system in the first quarter of 2005, a year after it first went in to alpha testing. Also, after 4 weeks of work, involving a lot of bug fixes, and documentation improvements to the source tree, PostgreSQL.org have released the 5th Beta of 8.0.0.
Karl Fischer takes a walk through the latest version of Gnome, version 2.8 (screenshots), to illustrate a few of the best new features of this very popular desktop environment.
Want to try a real Java + Linux based desktop? JD4X and ZerahStar are joining efforts to produce a next generation desktop. It is still in very early stages of development but worth the try.
Web services and service-oriented architectures continue to move into the mainstream. With IBM Rational XDE Developer v2003 — .NET Edition and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 to support you, there really aren't any excuses left to avoid exploring Web services. Start using them quickly and effectively through hands-on exercises. You'll be happy to see how easy it is to model and generate .NET XML Web services.
Remembering all the logins and passwords to all the services and systems you've got access to is pretty hard to do nowadays. Many people use the same login and password for multiple sites and systems. That won't improve security. One of the IT buzzwords is SSO (Single Sign-on). Most SSO systems are hard to setup and will only provide SSO to the systems of one company. It is possible to easily provide worldwide single sing-on.
Gnumeric is intended to be a drop in replacement for proprietary spreadsheets. It imports your existing Excel, 1-2-3, Applix, Sylk, XBase Quattro Pro, Dif, Plan Perfect, and Oleo files among others. The latest version 1.4.0 brings some major new features including:
The dmidecode project provides the means to learn exactly what claims your BIOS is making about your hardware. Strange as it might seem, it's useful information, even when it's not 100% reliable.
In a move dear to the hearts of conspiracy theorists, Microsoft has taken a minority position in Vintela Inc, a sister company of the SCO Group by virtue of the Canopy Group, their common investor.
The Fedora project was urged to be more community oriented and the editor showed an example of how community involvement helps to reduce Fedora boot time. Also, some intro on Sun's Solaris 10 over at LWN.
Novell hints at a conference all that Sun may not be able to open up solaris so easily since Novell claims copyrights and patents remain with Novell. Is this preventing the development of what may be the most powerful open source operating system in existance?
A company named Tech Source has stepped up to create an open source 2D/3D graphics card. The project has an open mailing list and a spec proposal for the final card can be downloaded here. This project is a groundbreaking effort at creating truely open hardware, and is great chance for everyone who is interested in 2D/3D programming to see how a modern graphics card works.
