David Adams Archive

Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases, according to official company blog posts and documents reported in this article. "Practically everyone inside Google" uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. "We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first."

We'd like to formally welcome Quentin Hartman, Tony Steidler-Dennison, and Amjith Ramanujam to the OSNews team. We had a huge response to our recent call for contributors, and if you were one of the people who contacted us, we're not done with you yet. Whether you're interested in contributing daily news or writing articles, we'll be contacting you soon, and these new editors are specifically tasked with helping to marshall the efforts of the other contributors. These new editors join Thom Holwerda, who's taking a sabbatical while trying to recover from RSI, David Adams, our Publisher and business manager, Adam Scheinberg, our webmaster and back-end guru, and Eugenia Loli-Queru, who is still occasionally lured out of retirement until the trolls and platform zealots earnest advocates remind her why she found it less stressful to take up videography. Welcome, n00bs!

This article takes a look at the issues involved with ditching Windows for Linux. It's not the most in-depth piece, but it provides a handy introduction of the 'how's and 'why's of shifting.

A Silicon.com article takes a look into the crystal ball, with Bill Gates departing from Microsoft, and posits the following potential changes: 1. A greater acceptance of open source 2. A new approach to Windows releases 3. Secure new revenue by buying big 4. Taking the web seriously through interoperability 5. More Microsoft than Gates .

"Vala is, in some sense, a new programming language. It’s syntax and structure leans heavily towards C#. As Jurg Billeter, the mastermind behind Vala, likes to put it; Vala is an amalgam of different C inspired languages, mostly C++ and C#. An though there is no mercury in this mixture, you'll find many a gold nugget in Vala."

Neil McAllister raises questions regarding the Web now that it no longer resembles Tim Berners-Lee's early vision: Is the Web still the Web if you can't navigate directly to specific content? If the content can't be indexed and searched? If you can't view source? In other words, McAllister writes, if today's RIAs no longer resemble the 'Web,' then should we be shoehorning them into the Web's infrastructure, or is the problem that the client platforms simply aren't evolving fast enough to meet our needs

The Firefox project was rewarded on Wednesday when Guinness World Records accepted that the 8,002,530 downloads of Firefox on 'Download Day' in June constituted a world record. Firefox is now officially in the record books for receiving the most downloads from a Web site with a 24-hour period.

This article by Shane Schick looks at changes Steve Ballmer should consider making at Microsoft now that Bill Gates is out the door. A couple of the most interesting: making user education a priority and establishing an open source project.

Despite holding grassroots appeal among guerrilla IT workers fed up with IT's sluggish responses to their requests, Google Apps' traction in the enterprise remains overblown. Sure, Google claims more than 500,000 companies have signed up for Google Apps, but according to Gartner, only a handful of employees at each company uses the tools. Comparing that with Microsoft Office's 500 million users, Garnter analyst Tom Austin calls Google Apps' cloud-computing impression on the enterprise 'a raindrop.'

Microsoft has responded to a recent challenge from Sun to answer some serious questions about Hyper-V — in particular, how Hyper-V can compete with Xen-based alternatives, and whether a Windows-only virtualization technology can hack it in today's increasingly heterogeneous datacenters.

InfoWorld's Tom Yager speculates on the road ahead for Symbian now that Nokia has established the Symbian Foundation to lead the OS into its open source era. The Foundation -- which includes five Symbian licensees, three major wireless carriers, and two embedded semiconductor manufacturers -- is certainly a motley crew, yet, as Yager writes, 'If Foundation members could agree on a set of objectives, it might be able to drive a new device from concept to wireless network deployment in a fraction of the time it takes today.'

"IBM has just announced it is Platform Solutions, Inc. (PSI), its small but most significant competitor. PSI is/was a small mainframe manufacturer that had sued IBM over the same anticompetitive practices in Europe and New York. The Computer & Communications Industry Association sees this as a clear attempt by IBM to purchase a company solely to foreclose competition in the mainframe marketplace, protecting IBM's cash cow at the expense of consumers. This acquisition should be a cause of concern for competition authorities throughout the world." Update: more discussion on this story here

The Sabayon Linux project has released version 3.5 and are now also officially sponsored by the NLnet Foundation. Highlights are: a new look, Linux kernel 2.6.25.9, X.Org 7.3, Compiz Fusion 0.7.6 and, and a new binary package manager called Entropy. Distribution screenshots are available here.

"Microsoft Monday confirmed it is investigating two-week-old reports from users unable to update client PCs using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), but said that it is "premature" to assume the snafu had the same source as another patch glitch the company has grappled with since mid-June. . . The WSUS bug was outlined nearly two weeks ago by Cecilia Cole, a WSUS program manager."