David Adams Archive

#2 US Telecom company SBC has a new set-top box with Tivo-like DVR and music and photo access capabilities. "Owners will be able to control the box remotely over an Internet connection, which will also provide access to streaming music and video downloads through SBC's deal with Yahoo. SBC said future enhancements will allow the box to be controlled through a Cingular wireless phone, and allow SBC's local phone customers to see caller ID and call logs on their TV sets." With TVs acting more like computers, and computers acting more like TVs, what will it look like when they meet in the middle?

American RadioWorks has an interesting investigation into the longer-term effects of the Y2K scare, especially its impact on the world's IT infrastructure. Y2K was a real potential problem, which was first ignored, but then most likely over-reacted to. But it was probably responsible for the rise of the Indian offshore IT boom. It also resulted in big productivity gains as decades of cruft were removed from datacenters during the fixes. For example, when the NY Stock Exchange was able to reassmble its systems six days after 9/11, it was because of the Y2K-related work they'd done.

A reader reports: I was trying to raise some money to start a Linux technical support website by selling Debian GNU/Linux and Fedora Core CD's on eBay and suddently after a month all my items were pulled and my account suspended. I received this message from ebay as reason: "As a matter of eBay policy, recordings on CD-R (including CD-RW and DVD-R) may not be listed on eBay, unless the seller is the copyright owner and states this in the item description. This policy also means that even lawful reproductions on CD-R are not permitted on eBay." This link was also provided.

NewsForge reports that PalmSource Vice President of Engineering Mike Kelley has published an open letter to the Linux community. IN essence, the end result will be the ability to run PalmOs and (bits of Beos integrated in PalmOs) on Linux. It will be a software layer that runs on top of Linux, and won't be open source.

This article explains steps to have your users logging on at their Linux/Unix desktops with their Windows AD accounts

From spintronics to clockless CPUs, 2004 was a year of process and research in the microprocessor industry. As a way to transition into the new year, this article offers a month-by-month look at the highlights of the 2004 microprocessor timeline.

On the freebsd-ppc mailing list Peter Graham has announced the availability of the first minimal install ISO of FreeBSD CURRENT for PPC (Make sure you're a power user with nerves of steel and read the blurb.

2004 has been a rough-and-tumble year for Linux. PC Pro has a month-by-month summary of the major events in Linux news over the year.

According to an article at DesktopLinux.com, the first public beta of Opera 8 is available for free download. It adds voice input/output and a host of other niceties. Key new features include improved RSS handling, fit to window or paper width, a start-bar for easy access to the most commonly used functions, and automatic update checks. The beta release supports Windows only, but a general release is scheduled for early 2005.

The cluster, a collection of computers that work together, is an important concept in leveraging computing resources because of its ability to transfer workload from an overloaded system (or node) to another system in the cluster. This article explains how to set up a load-balancing Linux cluster using Knoppix-based LiveCDs.

The third Release Candidate of the new version 4.2 of Xfce is now available for download. This third Release Candidate provides several bugfixes over the second Release Candidate. Also see the graphical installation wizards and changelog.

A public beta for Open Enterprise Server has been released. A fresh install is necessary, as they do not support an upgrade from Beta 4.

BBC's research and development team has released yet another open source project for network testing. Dubbed the Kamaelia project, released on Tuesday, is designed to simplify the creation and testing of new protocols for large-scale media delivery systems. This follows earlier efforts like the open source dirac project to create video codecs tailored towards streaming.

A News.com article speculates about what changes may come to the General Public License as Richard Stallman and co. prepare for a third revision to the license that has become so important and controversial with the rise of Linux and other GPL-licensed software.