Monthly Archive:: May 2005

Novell Posts Wider 2Q Loss; Shares Slide

Reports on Novell's quarterly earnings show that for all of the buzz about Novell's recent Linux activities, its well-being is overwhelmingly dependent on its declining legacy business. Quarterly revenue from software licensing fell from $60M to $46M in a year, and SuSE licenses only brought in $8 million (out of a total revenue of $297M). As would be expeced in a company trying to re-purpose itself for new opportunities, operating costs are on the rise, resulting in increased losses.

The Future of Linux on Laptops

Although Linux is growing meekly when it comes to end-user usage and interaction, the overall experience of using a Linux distribution has turned out to be a positive one for numerous beginners. In recent years, Linux has made advancements in leaps and bounds, which has led to its adoption by many corporate users as well as regular desktop users. Though it’s still not in a perfect state, the rapid pace of development in numerous areas of Linux promises a bright future, nonetheless.

Solaris 10 – UNIX for the people?

With a (relatively) big advertising campaign SUN promoted Solaris 10 (also known as SunOS 5.10). Referring to SUN, with the "revolutionary" JAVADesktop 2 and a lot of new features and improvements, Solaris 10 should be the best OS today. Solaris is free for SPARC owners and for private use or evaluation purpose it's also freely available on the x86. While Solaris actually is kind of a legend, I thought "Hu, this could be an interesting alternative on my PC". Thought, went on and downloaded the ISOs. Read on to see how an average user (me) have experienced Solaris.

Netscape 8.0 Requires Internet Explorer

When Netscape 8.0 came out a few days ago, I decided to read about its improvements. Well, I was surely surprised when I saw that it gives you the option of rendering "trusted" pages (as to how it determines what to trust, I have no clue) with the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It didn’t take long before this gave me an idea however. I decided to install Netscape on a copy of Windows that did not have IE installed. From there I would see how Netscape ran. As you can tell from this screenshot, I did this with 98lite. Interestingly enough, it turns out that you must have Internet Explorer before you can even install Netscape 8.0!

Actor William Fichtner on Technology, Movies & Career

Computer technology has become a major part of modern Hollywood movies. Almost every aspect of them has been passed through various computers and software refining the finished product and delivering astonishing results. But how does this new high-tech reality affects the artists involved? Versatile character actor William Fichtner is with us today to discuss these very issues along with his latest TV & movie projects. Mr Fichtner has become a well-known figure through blockbusters like Armageddon, Contact, Black Hawk Down, Go, Equilibrium, Heat, Perfect Storm, and many more.

There is more to data access than SQL

The number and variety of computing devices in the environment are increasing rapidly. Real computers are no longer tethered to desktops or locked in server rooms. PDAs, highly mobile tablet and laptop devices, palmtop computers, and mobile telephony handsets now offer powerful platforms for the delivery of new applications and services. These devices are, however, only the tip of the iceberg. Hidden from sight are the many computing and network elements required to support the infrastructure that makes ubiquitous computing possible.

The State of the Penguin

Not so long ago, adopting Linux for any endeavor was a radical idea. But for the radicals — early adopters and those asked to implement bleeding-edge technologies during the Internet boom — Linux was a perfectly reasonable solution. Paired with Samba, Linux offered more robust file and print services than Windows. Combined with the Apache web server, Linux powered web sites. The latter mixed with OSS tools such as Perl and MySQL transformed the Internet into a World Wide Web of possibilities.