Thom Holwerda Archive

Despite some challenges in 2005, Kevin Rollins, president and CEO of Dell, insists the company's business model is a strong one, and that he sees no significant changes to it in the year ahead. Rollins recently spoke with eWeek news editor Dennis Fisher and senior editors Jeffrey Burt and Brian Fonseca about such issues as customer server, channel strategies and AMD.

From the Dot: "Welcoming in the new year is People Behind KDE bringing us one of the little known stars of KDE development. Sebastian Trüg is the man behind one of KDE's most successful applications, K3b. Read the interview to find out how K3b started, what KDE needs to conquer the world and what keeps Sebastian motivated to work on the premier CD burning application."

The VOICE newsletter for OS/2 and eComStation has returned. The January issue can be found here, and it contains articles on NVU, DFSee, a report on WarpStock Europe 2005, and much more. "Finally! Some may have thought that the newsletter had gone the way of all flesh. Indeed, the revision has taken a while and we skipped some issues. This step was neccessary to be able to focus on our work, or it would have taken even longer. At this point, I would like to thank all the persons involved, especially Holger Manthey for many ideas, creating images, and his patience."

"Advocacy is a funny old game. Although it seems a loose and inexact science, developing as an advocate demands a range of communicative, philosophical and technical skills. Advocacy is not just about the message, but it is about the tone, colour and dynamics of the communication. As a professional advocate of Open Source, I get email asking about how to advocate efficiently and with a high degree of success."

The stock shot up like a weed on a sunny spring day. Red Hat shares rose 104 percent, making it the top gainer among 28 public companies based in the region. It highlights an adage of business: performance pays. Red Hat, after bolstering its executive ranks and making other tweaks, has reported solid sales and profit growth. In the most recent quarter, which ended Nov. 30, it beat analysts' expectations for both.

A new, deceptive trojan horse program has surfaced. The program is engineered to produce fake Google ads that are formatted to look like legitimate ones. Since the Trojan Horse makes the deceptive ads look like normal Google ads, the program was nearly impossible to detect by the general public. However, Raoul Bangera, discovered the bogus program and contacted the Google AdSense team. Bangera emailed the team a number of cases, including various screenshots, log files of an infected computer and system files as proof. The AdSense team validated the news saying, “We can confirm from the screenshots that these are fake Google ads, formatted to look like legitimate ads. We agree that this phenomenon is likely the result of malicious software installed on your computer.”

There is kind of a stir in the Amiga community. As Hyperion employees explained in an IRC chat, Hyperion suffers from a lack of hardware for the development (and thus sales) of AmigaOS4. However, what about Genesi? Genesi is the company behind the ODW, a PPC workstation that could potentially be the solution to Hyperion's lack-of-hardware problems. However, friction between the two companies is preventing them from coming to an agreement. More from the community here, and here. My take: I find this a rather silly situation. It is quite clear that Genesi is one of the few companies capable of offering a steady flow of PPC hardware for the AmigaOS, yet things in the past are preventing a financially interesting cooperation. And who suffer? Exactly-- Amiga fans.

"KOffice development is currently going on at a tremendous pace. Version 1.5, with Open Document as the default file format, will be released in March 2006 , and it is time to start collecting ideas for version 2. KOffice has received a donation of $1000 to be used as the prize in a GUI and Functionality Design competition. So whip out the RAD tools and your imagination and design the next big thing in office automation! Submissions to the competition should be GUI mockups accompanied with a written description of the intended workflow with ideas for the design of KOffice 2. See the KOffice 2 competition page for an example of how this could be done."

As 2005 draws to a close, a year with many changes for OSNews, we have one more big change to make OSNews a better place. But first, let us take a short look at all the big changes OSNews has seen this year.

Microsoft acknowledged late Wednesday the existence of a zero-day exploit for Windows Metafile images, and said it was looking into ways to better protect its customers. Even worse, by the end of the day nearly 50 variants of the exploit had already appeared. One security company said the possibilities were endless on how the flaw could be exploited. 'This vulnerability can be used to install any type of malicious code, not just Trojans and spyware, but also worms, bots or viruses that can cause irreparable damage to computers,' said Luis Corrons of Panda Software.

Peter Naulls, the RISC OS developer behind, among other things, the Firefox port for RISC OS, has published a list of things that are likely, or less-likely, to happen in the world of RISC OS in 2006. "I'll suggest some projects that are both plausible and possible in a relatively short space of time. Whether they will be carried out is another matter entirely, and nothing should be read into these that I or anyone else intends to carry them out. One prediction I will make right now is that I expect developer support to continue to wane in 2006, with an increasingly frustrating general RISC OS situation, which for the first time in a long time, has only a little to do with technical restrictions."

"Many times, you want to execute a command not only on one server, but also on several servers. With the help of tool called tentakel, you run distributed command execution. It is a program for executing the same command on many hosts in parallel using ssh (it supports other methods too)."

"Welcome to the very first issue of OS2eCS eZine! It has been awhile since the OS/2 community has had an online magazine or newsletter published. The last OS2eZine was published in December 2004 and the last VOICE Newsletter was August 2005! So we here at the OS2eCS Organization decided it was time to get the ball rolling again!" In this first issue articles on WarpVision, eSchemes, and more.

"I would like to announce a VMware Player image for Syllable 0.6.0a available in the normal VMware images location. This works fine with VMware Player on Linux. I haven't tried it yet on Windows, but I assume it works fine there, too. This is a default install from the ISO, just like the rest, so you'll have to install Developer's Delight and whatnot by yourself." And before people complain: Syllable is an open-source (GPL) operating system aimed at the home/office user. It is the continuation of AtheOS.