Rumors Archive

"These days, the 'revolution' is all about Linux. The word alone has become a catchcry for everything anti-establishment, anti-Bill, and anti-licensing fees. If you listen to the hype, it's being used everywhere, in businesses of all sizes, to do everything but make the coffee. Just because everybody's using Linux, however, doesn't mean everybody's happy for that fact to be known, as I found recently while looking for potential candidates for this special report about companies that had made the switch from Windows and Linux, and vice versa."

"While explaining the new splice() and tee() buffer management system calls, Linus Torvalds made reference to some possible future extensions. This included vmsplice(), a system call since implemented by Jens Axboe "to basically do a 'write to the buffer', but using the reference counting and VM traversal to actually fill the buffer." Reviewing the implications of using such a system call lead to a comparison with FreeBSD's ZERO_COPY_SOCKET which uses COW (copy on write)."

"Evans Data today announced the results of Developers' Choice - IDEs, a study in which over 700 developers ranked the features and capabilities of nine top IDEs that they currently use. IBM's Rational Application Developer edged past Borland's JBuilder to receive the highest overall relative scores against top IDEs including Eclipse, Macromedia Studio MX, and Oracle Developer Suite. IDEs were ranked in 13 distinct categories including compiler/interpreter, debugger, editor, compiler performance, performance of resulting apps, ease of use, sample apps, and libraries/frameworks."

"Over 500 million people use the Internet, and over a billion computers are deployed around the world. It has become impossible to ignore the issue of content management and access. Call it Digital Rights Management if you will, or call it working out how to manage copying in the digital realm. We need to solve the problem of how digital information will be shared, and an equally important need to set open and wide reaching standards. It has been more than ten years since computers and the Internet really started to take off, and there is still no coherent approach to restricted (or unrestricted) information sharing. This is a serious problem."

OSNews regular Kaiwai takes a superficial look at Vista and MacOS 10.4/10.5, and concludes: "To say that the changes in Windows Vista are only skin deep is missinformed to say the least; spend some time reading those sources I have listed, and even if you don't have a desire to run Windows Vista or particular interested in Windows based technology, it does provide some good resources explaining the changes and rationale behind those choices made. So from a purely technical point of view, Windows Vista is actually looking a whole lot more interesting than what the detractors have been saying in the computer press about the current direction."

"Sun has purportedly gone out of its way to draw Linux developers to its hardware platform. Analysts even say that Sun has finally made peace with Linux. But if you look at their web site they appear to have a different story to tell as they attempt to build community support for Solaris10. Frankly, we believe Linux beats Sun in so many categories that we don't even have a race. While Sun wants you to 'get the facts' we notice that they persist in comparing Solaris10 to Red Hat's enterprise model. But that's not the only Linux out there."

Linux News raises questions about Microsoft's alleged $6 billion per year investment in R&D. Is it money well spent, or are they just throwing it away?

"This article fairly eloquently expounds some of the reasons why Linux's job is not to become increasingly Windows-like, nor is it Open Source's duty to merely provide free duplicates of every Windows-user's favorite program. The issue has never been anything about Elite Snob vs. Concerned Newbie. It is simply a misunderstanding of what the Linux and the Open Source world is all about. Linux is not about repeating Windows with its features and flaws. It is an opportunity to experiment with new and wonderful alternatives", says OSNews reader Bob Jamison.

Matt Asay, who quit Novell recently, has written an opinion piece on the differences between Red Hat and Novell in the Linux industry. "Red Hat has long dominated the Linux market. In part this has resulted from serendipity - the company raised gobs of cash in a boom-time IPO and so was the first big player to market - but it also results from the company's rabid focus on customers. Importantly, Red Hat has never wavered from a core understanding that the low-hanging fruit is Unix."

Without tip-toeing around the matter, Linus Torvalds made his preference in the GNOME vs. KDE matter quite clear on the GNOME-usability list: "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE. This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do. Please, just tell people to use KDE." Also, "Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'." Update: More of the discussion here.

"One of the often cited reasons for not switching away from MS Windows is it's breadth of commodity hardware support. The argument often goes something like this: 'Since Windows supports all the hardware I have why would I want to risk it not working under Linux? It's better to continue to use what I know will work.' While that may be true in and of itself, I'm finding this argument to involve a limited outlook."

In this article .NET 2.0 won 2 out of the 3 major tests – clearly besting Java 1.5 in both execution speed and real-world memory efficiency. Java did, however, manage to hold its own in the native types memory comparison by a pretty wide margin. This indicates that on the whole .NET is a more efficient platform, with perhaps at least one area for improvement – native type memory efficiency.

"Excellent open source Outlook Express alternatives are available which provide similar and additional features. Such is the case with Mozilla's Thunderbird, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. Moving away from Outlook Express is a no-brainer, as our screen shots illustrate."

"With the release of StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org, and the rumors about MS Office 12, office suites are making their rounds in the press again. Microsoft's office suite is certainly the most popular on Windows, but there are competing suites from Corel and IBM. On GNU/Linux we have KOffice, GNOME Office, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, and more. But no matter if they are free or proprietary, expensive or cheap, and regardless of what platforms they run on, the one thing that all software suites have in common is that they suck."