Rumors Archive

John Droz is a Macintosh-using consultant and software developer who lives in North Carolina. When he and some other members of the community learned that the local school board was planning to scrap its Macs and standardize on Windows PCs, he decided to catalog as much information as he could on why the switch would be a bad idea. It's the kind of treasure trove that could fuel a flamewar of epic proportions. It makes for an interesting read, and is useful for ammunition for any Mac proponents that would be interested in launching their own holy war on this issue. See it all at macvspc.info.

Apple Computer, formerly the undisputed leader in sales of personal computers to schools, has steadily lost ground over the years to lower-priced PCs that run Microsoft Windows software. And these days the company faces another threat in the education market: a proposed class-action legal settlement by Microsoft that could result in the donation of hundreds of millions of dollars of Microsoft software to needy schools throughout California.

In their on-going GNU/Linux review series, most OfB have received much criticism from loyal users of the various distributions we have covered. Timothy R. Butler notes that many of the issued raised by those who commented on the series were cases of "knee-jerk" reaction and ponders how such reactions impact the community at large and its appearance to outsiders.

"We all know who makes the world's most popular desktop OS. With a greater than 90 percent market share, Microsoft's status is clear. But what's not so clear is: Who's number two? Of the contenders, Mac OS and Linux, which one is leading?" Read the editorial at OSOpinion.

Carlos Perez has posted 25 reasons why he thinks Java is a better platform than .NET while Jason Whittington has an opposite article counteracting Carlos' arguments.

"Michael C. Barnes takes an in-depth look at desktop operating system options available on the market today in this exclusive article at DesktopLinux.com. Evaluating over 30 desktop options for this article, Barnes dissects Microsoft Windows XP, offers a perspective on the evolution of the desktop, and reviews popular Desktop Linux options including Red Hat, ELX, Debian, Slackware, Lycoris and more." Read the article over at DesktopLinux.com.

In the Brazilian martial art capoeira, it can be hard to tell if the participants are fighting or dancing. Players cooperate and compete, and spend as much energy trying to impress the crowd and one-up each other as they do in combat. Read the article at ZDNews.

"A shoot-out between the two most popular distributions of the open source operating system found that each has its strengths, but that SuSE is the best option for people new to the operating system." Read more at ZDNet.

"I've recently installed both Gentoo 1.4 and Mandrake 9.0 (both bleeding edge distros). I'm not going to talk about the installation so much as the niceness factor. The niceness factor in my opinion is after doing a default install, how nice is it to use. Gentoo 1.4 hasn't been released yet, so things may change." Read the mini-review at NewsForge. The pluses for Mandrake installation are its speed and the absolute ease of obtaining and applying updates. It completely obliterates the Windows contenders in both the update category and the installation of attached devices. Read that article at LinuxWorld.

This time, DigitalVideoEditing is comparing the fastest (and cheaper) P4 released today, at 3.06 GHz, versus the fastest currently available Mac at 2x1.25 GHz. Has everyone noticed that Apple stoped using extensively the slogan "Mhz don't matter" for months now?

The Middleware Company (market leader in enterprise Java training and consulting) has performed a new comparison of the performance and scalability of J2EE and .NET based on the familiar Pet Store application. This time, the Middleware Company has re-coded the J2EE Petstore and optimized the implementation for performance. Their report show that .NET outperforms Java in most of the specific tests they conducted. Lots of discussion already here.

Enterprises tend to choose Linux because they must consider the availability of professional service, the IT learning curve, and standards and interoperability, the Yankee Group's Laura DiDio said. Read the article at NewsFactor.

The delivery of Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net IDE (integrated development environment) marked the beginning of the next battle phase for platform supremacy. Organizations must determine a directed approach toward platform selection and not get caught in a mire of ad hoc use. Business impact: Organizations' technology choices must reflect availability of skills, or they will risk enormous cost overruns. Read the article at TechUpdate.

Countless things have been said from both camps about the changes Red Hat did to both Gnome and mostly KDE for their upcoming OS, Red Hat 8.0, codenamed "Psyche". Read more to vote if you favor the UI changes needed to make a desktop OS to look and feel unified troughout the whole spectrum of applications it comes with, or you are favoring the idea that... Red Hat just tries to hurt KDE, possibly on purpose, just for the kicks of it... Let the community of users decide!