Monthly Archive:: November 2006

The theory behind open-source software is that it avoids many of the pitfalls - including cost - of closed alternatives. But Steven Buckley, who runs Christian Aid's common knowledge programme, prefers to buy software from the likes of Microsoft. Is this not odd for a charity? "Open-source doesn't mean free," he told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme. "Quite often, if you install open-source software within an organisation, you have a support contract that goes with it - it's an essential part of operating that software. Over time, that can actually cost more than having Windows on an enterprise machine."

Each day, members of the Windows team gather inside the 'shiproom' to go over the bugs that remain, and to debate which of these can still be fixed in the days left until Vista is declared finished, a milestone that is expected any time now. The intense 'end game', as these final weeks are known, is a well-worn tradition inside the shiproom, which is on the third floor of the Windows development building. The small room, with its dated, dark wood conference table has been the war room for every Windows release since Windows 2000. In the meantime, Ars takes a look at running Vista on older hardware.

Microsoft will pay Novell USD 348 million up front, but Novell will return USD 200 million of that amount over five years. The specific numbers came in an a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission made by Novell late Tuesday. "The financial commitments Microsoft is making as part of this agreement are significant," company CEO Ron Hovsepian said in a statement. In related news, Microsoft has denied that its patent deal with Novell is in breach of the GPL or will automatically spread Microsoft's patent protection to other Linux distributions.

"Each distribution has some specific tools to build a custom kernel from the sources. This article is about compiling a kernel on Ubuntu systems. It describes how to build a custom kernel using the latest unmodified kernel sources from www.kernel.org (vanilla kernel) so that you are independent from the kernels supplied by your distribution. It also shows how to patch the kernel sources if you need features that are not in there."

Yet another review of Fedora Core 6. "I'm through hoping that the next version of Fedora Core will fix all of the problems with the previous release. Fedora's identity has gradually eroded over six releases, finally ending up as a second class clone of Ubuntu. On the other hand, Red Hat Linux was never really all that easy to install, configure, and use, so I guess this is just the natural evolution of a product that was destined to be eclipsed by more complete distributions like Mandriva and more easily configured distributions like SUSE."

Posted to the Apple Darwin-kernel mailing list today by Todd Miller: "SEDarwin is a port of the TrustedBSD Mandatory Access Control Framework to Apple's Darwin operating system platform, along with a Type Enforcement policy based on SELinux. SEDarwin is still experimental, but currently allows the enforcement of mandatory process and file protections under Darwin 8.7 (Mac OS X 10.4.7) on Apple PowerPC hardware."

"While Nokia may not have hit wonders like the Motorola RAZR or LG's Chocolate in its product line, its phones pack a plethora of features with latest technologies to wow you. Take the Nokia 9300 smartphone, for instance. The 9300 is a direct competitor to Palm's Treo and RIM’s BlackBerry offerings, and we must say, Nokia has a fairly durable solution on its hands for executives on the go."

Only a few weeks after the first release of ZETA 1.21, Magnussoft has just announced some details of what can be expected from the next version of ZETA. According to the announcement, the central piece of ZETA 1.5 will be what magnussoft calls project MediaFire, a completely new application for CD and DVD burning, the long awaited multi-user capability and an upgraded SAMBA implementation.

A review of Fedora Core 6 from 3 perspectives - the end user, the developer and the power user. Also explores the implications of the release as an indicator that the Linux platform is coming together to form a significant competitor to proprietary products.

One of the world's largest computer and consumer electronics manufacturers will ship a completely open, Linux-based, GPS-equipped, quad-band GSM/GPRS phone direct, worldwide, for USD 350 or less, in Q1, 2007. The Neo1973 is the first phone based on the open-source 'OpenMoKo' platform.

"Today Adobe announced that the EMCAScript 4 compatible virtual machine in the Adobe Flash Player has been contributed to the Mozilla project under the name Tamarin. It is the single largest contribution to Mozilla since its inception and consist of about 135000 lines of source code. The engine is fully open source using the standard Mozilla license, with the Mozilla foundation retaining full ownership."

We are on the brink of a very exciting time. The buzzword-friendly "Web 2.0" is here, and it's most punctuated by three terms: social networking, AJAX, and RSS. Nothing about these things is inherently new - AJAX existed as an ActiveX control present in Microsoft's Outlook Web Access long ago, social networking has existed for some time via sites like Friendster, and RSS is just a style of XML, which has been floating around in mainstream tech circles for about 10 years. But Web 2.0 is here, like it or not. The question is, as use of these technologies begins to become more widespread, how are we going to shape these technologies, and who is going to make those decisions?

Want to be able to access your machine anytime, anywhere? Can't be bothered purchasing a domain name and configuring Dynamic DNS? Microsoft has a solution: the 'Windows Internet Computer Name' - a unique domain name for your computer. There is one small catch though: you have to be using the next-generation networking protocol IPv6 which, although thoroughly integrated into Windows Vista, isn't supported by most home routers yet.

As the final runup to Vista RTM continues, Microsoft has announced that the .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly WinFX) has RTMed and is available on Microsoft Downloads. This is a significant milestone for the Developer Division, and delivers on some of the promises of Windows Vista programmability on earlier platforms.